If you’re looking to support the current and lifelong well-being and success of your students, teen mental health experts say the best thing your school can do is create a meaningful mental health action plan.
The great news is, your school can be one most important sources for good mental health, resilience, social connectedness, and empowerment among the teens who go there. The less good news is that if you get it wrong, you could have a lasting negative impact on your student body.
Thankfully, teen mental health care specialists, like Mission Prep, have advice on how you can create a mental health action plan for your school. This includes the benefits of these plans, the best process to develop an effective plan, essential mental health support strategies, and when to seek professional clinical help.
A good mental health action plan will hold a myriad of benefits for your school, chief among them:
Given these incredibly important benefits, Mission Prep believes it is imperative for you to develop your own mental health action plan.
The first step to a great plan will be reviewing your existing policies to assess whether they are working, and closely studying the current state of mental well-being in your school.
You should then collaborate with key staff, including school heads, welfare team members and teachers, as well as with parents and community members and students themselves, to see what will make a meaningful difference.
In order to draft and develop your plan, you should follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Timely) framework. You can find a list of effective reflection questions to guide schools through this process here.
If you want to make strides towards better mental health for your student body, but you feel out of your depth, many clinical experts, like Mission Prep, are highly available for consultations.
Mission Prep knows that a good mental health action plan is really a team effort, and they are always happy to be a part of your team.