The Bearsden Festival – Community and Mental Health

Guest blogger Trish Robertson is organising a festival in our local community of Bearsden. In previous years its focus has been on bringing the community together. This year the emphasis is on the role of community in supporting those with mental health issues. Trish explains why.

“I’m Trish Robertson, and I’m coordinating the Bearsden Festival for the first time this year. It was started back in 2013 by New Kilpatrick Church minister, Roddy Hamilton as a way of bringing community together, and this year has taken on a new impetus with our focus on something that touches all of us in some way – mental health.

This time last year I was devastated to be caught up in an attempted suicide. With hindsight and better awareness, we could have picked up the signs of distress earlier, and when it happened we realised just how stretched mental health services are. It brought home how vital it is to speak more openly about mental health, offering our support to family and friends and across the community. There’s so much we can do around prevention and resilience building, dealing with issues before they reach crisis point.

The festival will be celebrating the impact of the arts on our mental health and is inspired by and linked to the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (www.mhfestival.com) led by the Mental Health Foundation. We have planned it so that everyone can engage – all ages and people who feel well, those who want to find out more, those who want to find ways to be more aware for themselves and others and those with lived experience of mental ill health. So we have various performances and interactive sessions, speakers and outdoor events, organised into three strands:

Inform: speaking about how the community can engage with mental health projects and how to help our friends and neighbours by listening, signposting and volunteering. We’ve invited local schools to display how mental health is being taught, with some of their pupils’ work reflecting their own experiences and emotional wellbeing, in venues around town.

Inspire: all sorts of performances – choirs, theatre, drumming, bands, dance involving people from all walks of life to encourage wellbeing and capture a picture of what our community can offer in encouraging and supporting wellbeing.

Ignite: your chance to have a go, with a whole range of activities to choose from, like tai chi, samba drumming, a Scottish fiddle jam, creative zone, silent disco or outdoor play zone.

All this we hope will raise the agenda of mental health in the community, encourage people to make connections, and possibly help us to work out gaps in support that need filled.

We’re so grateful for all the support we’ve received developing the ideas, for financial support from Big Lottery Scotland, New Kilpatrick, Glasgow Flightpath and East Dunbartonshire Council, and that so many community organisations and volunteers are already on board. We’ll launch the full programme in March and you can catch up with developments on social media @bearsdenfest and online at www.bearsdenfestival.org

Hope to see you there. Trish”

We will be sharing more details about the Bearsden Festival, which is being held in May. If your community is doing something exciting that you’d like to share with us please get in touch at ayearofsmallchanges@gmail.com, or via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter