TOTEM: Talking Openly To Embrace Mental Health
A peer mentoring course for young people that has a focus on mental health.
Following consultations, young people told us they wished their friends knew what to do to support them if they were struggling with their mental health. Working in collaboration with young people, we developed TOTEM, an interactive, award-winning, peer mentoring offer for secondary schools with a focus on mental health.
How does TOTEM work
The course is designed to upskill pupils within secondary school settings to spot signs that their friends are struggling and how to best support them. It also covers lots of personal reflection on themselves and how to support our own wellbeing if we are supporting those around us. The course is shaped to adhere to many of the PHSE Framework outcomes in relation to health and wellbeing, relationships, and living in the wider world.
TOTEM can be delivered to any year group, but typically, schools select pupils from years 9 onwards so they can support the lower age groups. You can select a cohort of up to 30 young people, and these can be from one particular year group or a mix from across the year groups.
TOTEM's Aims
- Increase young people’s awareness of their own skills, qualities and boundaries when supporting others with their mental health.
- Enable young people to work with their peers to identify what issues arise in their school or group setting.
- Explore key issues around mental health, such as self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, loneliness, isolation, and online harm, in a safe space where risk and resilience factors can be explored.
- To learn conversational skills between mentor and mentee to increase young people’s confidence to support their peers and start conversations off if they are concerned.
- To practice through role play and other interactive activities how these conversations may go and how to best navigate them, using therapeutic and evidence-based principles.
- To look at a systematic approach to resilience and the role we all play in developing this.
- Empower young people to have a voice around their school/settings mental health policy and approaches and what role they feel they can play in strengthening this, which is fed back to SLT and key people in the setting.
TOTEM was an extremely useful course that helped me understand the ins and outs of mental health and how to help tackle it. It was delivered in a thoughtful and professional manner and deeply improved my understanding of the need to be self aware and reflective of one's emotional well-being. Totem taught me all the essential skills needed to be a good peer mentor and I found the initial self-reflection portion of the course to be interesting and exciting with debates on topics engaging me and the other students. Overall, this training has allowed me to be a fully informed and motivated peer mentor and I feel all students should have access to a course like this.
Student in Year 12
Interested in TOTEM?
Register your interest here