May is National Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to drive conversations, create connections, and offer compassion to ourselves and others. Kaiser Permanente has many resources and tools to help our employer groups, producers, members, and communities, including these highlights this month.
Mental Health Awareness Virtual Training for Employees
Mental Health Awareness Training provides employers a turnkey tool for developing a stigma-free environment where their employees feel safe and supported in talking about mental health and seeking care when needed. The 30-minute training, based on Kaiser Permanente’s offering for our own employees, is free to any employer, and at no cost.
New PSAs on Find Your Words
Find Your Words, our public health awareness campaign on mental health, continues to be an important resource for information, inspiration, and support. During May, Kaiser Permanente will again team up with iHeart Media to promote video messages from major recording artists like Miley Cyrus, Sam Smith, Huey Lewis, and 24kGoldn, with more coming throughout the month.
Presence of Mind Stream Series
Presence of Mind is Kaiser Permanente’s groundbreaking youth mental health initiative in collaboration with esports organization Cloud9 to reduce stigma around mental health and encourage teens and young adults to prioritize their well-being. Every other week, Presence of Mind hosts a livestream series on Twitch, the leading streaming platform for gamers. A new episode is live on May 27 at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time.
NAMIWalks Your Way: A United Day of Hope
On May 22, individuals and teams can support mental health during this year’s virtual event. Kaiser Permanente is sponsoring these events in several markets and encouraging people to take part by walking, running, crafting, biking, baking, and more all to raise awareness. Learn more and sign up here.
New Calm Meditations Available
Kaiser Permanente’s Wellness Resource Center offers a robust library of meditations, mindfulness activities, and helpful articles on a variety of mental health topics to ease anxiety, manage depression, improve relationships, and much more. It will soon include 6 new meditations from the digital self-care app Calm with techniques to help reduce stress and sleep better. These tools will become available at the end of May.