Mental Health Awareness Week with SWPA
Mental Health Awareness Week 2021 is a great opportunity to share with our colleagues, people often talk about friends and family, but we spend around a third of our days with our colleagues. The theme this year is nature, particularly relevant as many of us have discovered spaces close by and have seen them in a different light to life pre-pandemic.
As the Mental Health Foundation has written, ‘Nature is so central to our psychological and emotional health, that it’s almost impossible to realise good mental health for all without a greater connection to the natural world. For most of human history, we lived as part of nature. It is only in the last five generations that so many of us have lived and worked in a context that is largely separated from nature. And it is only since a 1960s study in the US found that patients who were treated in hospitals with a view of nature recovered faster, that science has started to unpack the extraordinary health benefits.’
So, what does this mean for our current and future communities? We need to improve on and engage with what we have today and use this to shape and transform the future so that all our built environment has nature featured within it.
Director of SWPA, Mary Bennell, says, ‘Creating spaces for nature within developments, especially for housing, has never been more crucial. The appointed companies on SWPA frameworks will work with public sector organisations to make or existing and future spaces work for communities.’
At SWPA the way the last year has changed the way we work, the conversation around mental health has opened up much more. Working from home has meant that we have lost some of the social aspects of work, we have tried to combat this by having some online social time together.
Mental Health Awareness training, through MHFA, has also been offered to each team member to help recognise and begin to understand any potential problems within ourselves, colleagues, friends, and family.
This week we look forward to getting out and exploring the nature within our communities once more and building strong relationships to support each other.
Contact the team today to find out which of our frameworks or DPS will be most suitable to improve the link to nature in your area or create new developments with better integrated design.
