Mission Australia Dubbo launched this year's Mental Health Month campaign with its annual MIND Your Health and Wellbeing walk to raise awareness for mental health and wellness.
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Mental Health Month is celebrated each year in October across NSW. A range of community services unite to promote the campaign through activities held over the duration of the month.
This awareness month's theme is 'Share the Journey', which aims to encourage people to think about their mental health and wellbeing, start conversations and educate yourself to understand the importance of mental health in our everyday lives.
Mission Australia was joined by Dubbo MP Dugald Saunders, other community services including headspace and community members on Tuesday morning to walk down Macquarie Street.
The group, led by Mission Australia Support worker Emma Barrett, were then joined in Macquarie Lions Park where they then met with more services including Wellways.
"For me the walk today is to raise awareness for mental health. Mental health to me is big because there's still such an existing stigma and hopefully we can get people to talk and push towards breaking the stigma down," Mrs Barrett said.
"We have quite a lot of services walking with us and waiting at the park which is great. We have a lot of mindfulness activities, games, cake and coffee and a bit of Reiki.
"At the start, we were going to particularly focus on adults but then we thought nope, it's important for our younger generations as well. I think there's a lot of younger people out there who feel embarrassed to talk about it because it's so shunned upon."
Mrs Barrett said she was aiming to promote coming together, while also raising awareness of the services available to Dubbo people.
"It's about providing education, information and then moving on from there," she said.
Mrs Barrett said mental health was something she's passionate about.
"We just want people to go, you know what, I'm not alone."