Often the discussion around mental health immediately leads to conversations surrounding crisis, but on May 5, the Spring Bliss mental wellness festival wants to change that.
The goal of the third annual festival, according to Stacey Perlin, Chairperson for the Perlin Foundation for Wellbeing, is to give Calgarians a fun way to engage with mental health outside of illness and crisis.
“It’s this preventative storytelling that helps us see the experience in a whole different light. I like to think of it as you’re dealing with electrical wiring: we’re putting some padding on that wiring, so it doesn’t feel like you’re hitting a sharp nerve when something happens,” she said.
“A lot of our stress comes from—especially conflict comes from—our reactions to situations rather than the actual situations.”
The festival, which is being held at Carya Village Commons in the East Village, will be free for visitors to attend from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Perlin said that nearly two dozen different social agencies, mental health organizations, and community partners in mental health will be attending.
Many, she said, will have a focus on having fun activities and games.
“We can exemplify just how amazing the fun part is, when we talk about the fact that it’s not just your typical expected, developed within the last 100 years mental health resources.”
Science of supportive mental health informs the design of the festival
Perlin said that there was some serious science behind the approach taken at Spring Bliss, which is aimed at engaging people in ways that help them to remember and be able to use the mental health teachings at the festival.
“You don’t want people to just pick up a brochure and maybe read it. You want them to ask a question about it, develop a bit of critical thinking around it, practice it with somebody in the same space and laugh when it doesn’t go the way that you planned,” she said.
“It’s way easier to walk out of there and tell that experience to somebody else, or to remember it when you have something coming up and go, you know, maybe I’ll try it different this time, which is really what we’re asking people to do.”
Among the planned activities is a mental health Jeopardy game, painting and art therapy activities, and the ability to talk to mental health and brain researchers in a low-pressure environment.
“Branch Out Neurological Foundation is bringing three of their researchers, and they’ve been developing games to translate healthy brain research for kids and families,” Perlin said.
Arts and community fun part of the fundamentals of mental health
The art activities will be a major focus of the festival this year,
“We want to get them thinking about arts… they’ve developed these amazing, different handouts and activities so that you’re introducing mindfulness, calming exercises for your nervous system, which is really cool,” said Perlin.
“We’re actually doing this beautiful splatter chemistry project where we’ve got different themes in the conversation… and they’re going to be able to use paint sticks and tempera paint to splatter their colours, their emotions, their thinking, and what they associate with those different themes.”
That completed art project by visitors gives an insight into what their emotional ecosystems are like, said Perlin.
“The idea here is that we’re trying to showcase that people have complex emotions when it comes to our health system. It’s not all going to be green and gold specks, it’s going to have some different darker colours in there, because people are going to be reminded of things,” she said.
“I want us to be able to say that there’s this amazing tapestry of rich emotional experience associated with our health system so that we can lean into that vocabulary and start to get more to help people to come with up with the words when they’re stuck having a conversation with their doctor about their internalized internal environment—their mind experience.”
Other aspects of the festival include community-based mental health support, but perhaps not in a way that most Calgarians would immediately recognize them.
The festival will be featuring singing and performances supported by TIES Healthy Minds, Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association, and the Centre for Newcomers.
“We’ve been supporting each other’s well-being for thousands of years, and that comes from our traditions, our songs, our art, our performance, our gathering around together and community,” said Perlin.
“We want you to laugh, we want you to have fun, getting curious, and playing.”
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