Young hockey players embrace issues of mental health

WOOLWICH MINOR HOCKEY TEAMS ARE

joining in the message of taking care of your mental health and not bottling it up by designing posters to help promote Woolwich Counselling Centre’s Together for Mental

Health event set for May 25.

Executive director Amanda Wood-Atkinson said the organization is aiming to get more local sport organizations involved with not only promotion, but also having the discussion around mental health and wellness within their own teams and clubs. In response, Woolwich Minor Hockey held a contest for teams to design posters around that theme, with four teams joining in.

Getting such a strong response to the campaign is another step in reducing the stigma around mental health issues,

Wood-Atkinson said,

“It helps children and youth to understand the importance and to take a moment to focus on mental wellness and to think about ways that they can individually promote mental wellness, and as a group or a team or an organization to really come together around mental wellness. I think it helps to develop new norms to say that it’s okay to talk about mental health and that in the same way that we were to rally around an individual on a team or within an organization who has another kind of illness or disability or challenge in the same way we do that with mental health,” she said.

Lisa Backman, who is on the Woolwich Minor Hockey’s diversity and inclusivity committee, said this was not a difficult discussion to have with the kids, especially given that it is now part of the school curriculum.

“The age group that we have are 9, 10 and

11, and they were pretty open to the conversation. For them, they’re in a generation that’s growing up where it’s not the stigma of mental health anymore. It’s like, ‘let’s talk about it and let’s see how we can help each other and get through it together,’ so it wasn’t that difficult,” she said.

One of the teams, U11 BB, took the idea of not bottling things up literally by designing a poster with different bottles, each of which had ways of coping with mental health challenges written on them. The design is an indication that even kids as young as 9 are very much aware of the conversation, said parent Shari DeCaire.

“You can tell that there’s already been some coaching and some talking about mental health. It certainly wasn’t something that they had no clue what I was even talking about,” she said.

Taking second place in the contest, the team decided the $100 in prize money would be donated to the Woolwich Counselling Centre.

“We were really just blown away by the different posters that came in, and then by the generosity of this particular team in donating their prize money,” Wood-Atkinson said.