This week is Mental Health Week, however, I think that to simply devote one week in a year to this vital topic is a fundamental mistake. Mental health should not be in our mind one week in a year, but all year round. This has become especially pertinent during lockdown, where mental health has become an issue that pervades our daily lives. We are not getting the normal amount of human, face-to-face contact that we need to keep going and keep ourselves happy all of the time. As such, when thinking of a way to adapt our CAS project in order to aid the people who lockdown would have made us unable to help, we felt there was only one thing we could do: to give those people a source of help and, hopefully, amusement in this trying time.
So, Abdullah and I decided to put together something which would provide people with the bit of advice to give someone the help that they need. We did some digging and found our way towards Mr Petrie, who gave us some guidance as to what form our ideas could take. By the end of that week, we had decided to assemble a podcast. Mr Petrie also advised us to have a look at getting Miss McMillan as a potential first guest, as she is a real expert in the field. As such, she was our next port of call; we got her onboard, then set about thinking about what we wanted to get out of this podcast.
We decided quite early on that while we wanted the podcast to be friendly and jokey, we would also need to find the right balance between just having a laugh and creating something worthwhile. This was where Miss McMillan and Mr Petrie really helped us out; Miss was a fantastic driving force in the first recording and Sir enabled us to centre in on the talking points that we wanted for the episode.
Recording was not nearly as difficult as we had thought – since Zoom has a built-in recording feature, we simply had to click record and start the conversation. Because me and Abdullah are naturally talkative people we found that the conversation flowed really well, and we finished the recording on a bit of a high. We weren’t convinced that it would work, but we managed to pull it off and the end result, when we listened back to it, was something of a quality which we were really happy to have produced. Overall, the process of creating the podcast has been a blast and we are planning to put an episode out every week, with a different guest each time. If there’s a good response, then we are really hoping to be able to continue this for the extent of lockdown at least – and who knows what will happen from there.
In short, we’d both like to say thank you all so much, to those who’ve helped us make this thing and to those who might listen to it. We truly hope that it will bring a smile to some faces during lockdown. All the best.
You can listen to Ben and Abdullah’s weekly podcast on the Health and Well-being Firefly page.
