We have the wonderful Lillian taking over the blog again and this time she's sharing her experience as a Youth Mental Health Champion.

If you missed her last post check it out here.

During the last academic year, I trained to be a Youth Health Champion. This was an amazing and insightful experience where I learned a great deal about what it means to be healthy.

I believe that in recent years people have been making an increased effort to understand health issues, prevalently mental health issues. This is the main reason I decided to become a Youth Health Champion, as mental health is something I am incredibly passionate about and I saw this as an excellent opportunity to educate myself further.

As well as this, it allowed me to make connections between physical and mental health which have since benefitted me massively; for example, during this stressful exam season I have been making sure that I keep my body healthy, as this will help me to keep my mind healthy. This has allowed me to focus myself more and relax – which is very important! As well as this, attending Youth Health Champions has helped me to normalise discussions of mental health in my everyday life, which has enabled me to be more open and understanding.

I attended Youth Health Champions with one of my good friends – which I recommend doing, as we are both passionate about health and it allowed us to discuss the things we learned. Furthermore, it enabled us to have a better understanding of our own bodies; which is very empowering in my opinion. We also created and delivered a presentation to a year 7 class about what resilience means and how to demonstrate that in your everyday life. We believed that this was an important topic and tailored the presentation to a year 7 audience by exploring how you could be resilient in making new friends and coping in a new environment. This was one of our last projects as Youth Health Champions and it allowed me to feel like I had taken on what I had learned and passed it on to others.
Finally, not only did the course offer me an increased knowledge on subjects I am interested in, it also earned me a Level 2 qualification!