How we marked Mental Health Awareness Week 2024
The BPC marked Mental Health Awareness Week 2024 by exploring different facets of mental health and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective. We went digging into our own archives as well as looking further afield, across the following topics: movement, climate anxiety, identity, trauma, play and bereavement.
If you missed our mail-outs on each day with our selected resources, don’t worry. You can still explore some of our selections below and delve into the psychoanalytic discourse on each of the daily themes:
Themes:
On day one, we looked at the theme of movement. The resources look at the mind and body in tandem and discuss ways in which moving the body and our physicality has been thought of in a psychoanalytic context:
- Read our catch-up with Katarina Horrox from 2023 who specialises in outdoor therapy.
- Read Michael Brearley’s ‘The Roots of Sport’ on the Institute’s website that discusses childhood development through movement and sport.
- Listen to this BBC Sounds podcast episode that looks at the deadly sin of ‘slot’ and the social contexts in which our bodies move and rest in the world.
On day two, we shifted our focus to climate anxiety. Psychoanalysts and mental health experts discuss the ways in which guilt, denial and urgency arise, bringing difficult emotions to the fore as we battle with the environment’s trajectory.
- Read this ‘Climate Emergency’ themed issue of New Associations where writers grapple with denial, activism research and Winnicottian thinking within climate crisis discussion.
- Read this Guardian article where Registrant Susie Orbach attempts “find a way… towards a new ethics of responsibility”.
- In this The American Psychoanalyst Essay, Karbelnig looks to psychoanalytic ways of understanding climate change.
For the third day, we looked at identity. Our selected thought pieces question how social and political contexts interact and play into personal lives. They discuss the significance of identity politics in today’s discourse and how different factors can affect individual notions of identity.
- Read this New Associations article (p8) where Anna Motz reflects on BPC Awardee Fakhry Davids’ conference workshop in which participants could “consider how the experience of being a first or second generation immigrant affects once’s cultural identity.”
- Listen to this episode of ‘Voices from ROOM’ where the hosts and guest discuss how we struggle to maintain personal and group identities in a political context.
- Our New Associations Editorial Board recommended reading the book Natives by Akala to delve further into race and class identities within the context of post-imperial Britain. You can listen to him talk to Ash Sarkar about the book by clicking here for further context.
Trauma was a our focus on the fourth day of Mental Health Awareness Week. In these selected discussions, psychoanalytic scholars and practitioners explore the effects of trauma in the context of tragic events, inter-generational relationships, human development and childhood.
- In this New Associations front page article, Jo Stubley discusses recovery in the context of the Grenfell fire in 2017.
- Read this IPA Blog Entry where Jill Salberg delves into how inter-generational trauma can act as a haunting presence inside family homes and dynamics.
- Our New Associations Board recommends watching this video from Anna Freud on the effects of childhood trauma on the brain.
On day five of Mental Health Awareness Week, we looked at play. The resources below look at the importance of play in a psychoanalytic context.
- In this New Associations article (p12) Joanna Fortune discusses “the pursuit of play” in her career where she’s been “dedicated to finding ways to ensure that we all live more playful lives”.
- Listen to this episode of ‘Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch’ where Joel Whitebook discusses magic in the history of psychoanalysis and relates it to religion, transference, play and healing.
- Our Editorial Board of New Associations recommends this video from the Freud Museum that provides an engaging introduction to the importance of play.
On our sixth and final day of Mental Health Awareness Week, we looked at bereavement. The resources below look at bereavement through a psychoanalytic lens but within different stages of life, from stages of change to parenthood, and from medical as well as personal perspectives.
- In this New Associations article (p2) by Eileen McGinley the writer compares Freud’s postulations on grief and loss to modern day categorisations by the APA.
- This video from the Society of Analytical Psychology places loss and death into the context of change, growth, development and the arc of life.
