Petition: Introduce Mental Health Education to the National Curriculum

I wasn't going to post until next week, however my friend brought this petition to my attention. This won't be a long post, but I do want to talk a bit about this.

If you know me personally, on Twitter, or you have read my blog posts you will surely know that I do whatever I can to raise awareness for Mental Health, so when this petition was brought to my attention I did not hesitate to sign it.

Mental Health should be added to National Curriculum because I really feel that people should be educated on mental health from their last years at school, at least. It is so important for young (and older, of course) people to know how they can seek help instead of suffering in silence, what mental health is, etc. in order to reduce stigma in society as a whole and to help people realise how important knowing about mental health really is.

I don't remember being spoken to about mental health in school at all. We weren't educated on it. Instead, I taught and educated myself on it. But for a lot of my peers at school, they were not educated meaning that they basically would be ignorant to the real issue that is there rather than understanding what it is.
We were taught about 'speaking up' about bullying and such, but what about 'speaking up' about mental health disorders? I do remember asking a question about mental health one time, I think I was in year 9 but my teacher dismissed it. She said, 'We'll save that for another time' - end of conversation. I was shocked mainly because I knew how important it was to talk about mental health, but unfortunately it was not on the curriculum so teachers couldn't teach us.

But, hopefully this will change soon. With your help, if you are from the UK then please sign this petition (https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/104545). If you are not a UK resident, please share this post/the petition and hopefully this issue will be considered for debate in Parliament very soon.


Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it.

Until next time, be you and keep smiling.

Tiffany x