Every year in the Library, we celebrate University Mental Health Day and World Book Day. Read on to learn about the events we’ll be running and how you can get involved…
What is University Mental Health Day?
University Mental Health Day is a national campaign run by Student Minds and UMHAN, with the aim of raising awareness and promoting mental health support for students and staff in higher education.
Since 2016, we have celebrated the University Mental Health Day in the Library, as well as World Book Day, exploring different themes related to mental health. This year, the focus of the campaign is on using your voice and taking part in the conversation around mental health in the university context.
Here’s what Community Engagement is doing this year on 7th March in the Library and other study spaces.
“Your Voice, Your Story”
In the main Library, between 2 and 4 pm, we’ll give you an opportunity to use your voice and reflect on your student experience. UMHAN note, “we all have mental health, we all have a voice and we all have stories to share. You best understand what it is like to live, work and study at university. We want to celebrate the power of your voice in creating long-lasting change”.
You can get involved by attending the event on the day and by adding your contributions, in form of text, photos, videos to the Moodle page. As an inspiration, think about what brought you joy and encouragement in your student life, which challenges you have faced as a student and which lessons have you learnt and could pass on as advice to others. We’ll anonymise the snippets and use them to create a collage of student stories.
Lastly, we’re hoping to end the day with a performance event, where we’re inviting the students to share any texts (poems, short stories, abstracts, etc.), either their own or a piece by another author that resonates with them and/or reflect their student story. If you would like to get involved, please email [email protected].
Human Library
From 12 to 2 pm we’ll be hosting the first ever Human Library event at Warwick University which will be held in the Postgrad Hub. The Human library was originally developed in the year 2000 in Copenhagen and is based on the concept of people as books. The aim is to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions that we have about others and start a conversation. This event is open to all postgraduate students as well as Warwick University staff. Click on the link to find out more about the Human Library.
Your Voice, Your Passion
Keeping a good work-life balance is important for any student, but as a postgraduate, with more work and less peer support from course buddies, it becomes even more vital. It’s important to keep perspective and to have hobbies and passions outside of your studies so that you don’t become all-consumed by your work.
To reflect this, the Postgrad Team is running an event to coincide with Research Refresh at 10:30am-12pm in the Wolfson Research Exchange, where postgraduates can share their extra-curricular hobbies and show they are more than just their dissertation or thesis, and gain inspirations from the interests and passions of others!
This can be done either in the form of a short presentation (approx 5 mins) or in the form of an A3 poster (of the kind that would be displayed at an academic poster conference – only more fun!)