Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 – A complete guide for HR teams

By Anouska Shenn
14th February 2024, 18:33 PM UTC

Mental Health Awareness Week may be just one week in the workplace wellbeing calendar, but for office management and HR teams (and wellbeing providers!), it represents months of planning, coordination, and careful execution. 2025 marks our eighth year running Mental Health Awareness Week activities for our clients around the world. Over the years, we’ve learned what makes these initiatives land, common pitfalls to avoid, and how to create lasting impact beyond the week itself.

We’ve compiled the most frequently asked questions from HR teams, office managers, and wellbeing leads to help you plan and execute a successful Mental Health Awareness Week programme. Whether you’re organising your first campaign or looking to refresh your approach, you’ll find practical guidance drawn from our work with companies of all sizes and across different sectors and cultures.

What is Mental Health Awareness Week?

Mental Health Awareness Week is the UK’s annual national campaign focusing on mental health and wellbeing. Founded by the Mental Health Foundation in 2001, the scheme takes place over five days each year and provides a platform for education and awareness-building activities in workplaces, schools, and communities around the country. Mental Health Awareness Week helps organisations to encourage conversations around mental health, challenge stigma, and promote understanding of mental wellbeing in diverse environments. For HR teams, it offers a valuable opportunity to strengthen workplace mental health support systems and demonstrate their company’s commitment to employee wellbeing.

When is Mental Health Awareness Week 2025?

This year, Mental Health Awareness Week is taking place on 12th-18th May 2025. The campaign runs over seven days each year, usually in the third week of May, from Monday to Sunday. In the United States, May is recognised as Mental Health Awareness Month. Many organisations in the UK are adopting this approach, using the official awareness week as a focal point within a broader month of mental health activities.

What is the theme for Mental Health Awareness Week 2025?

In 2025, the theme for Mental Health Awareness Week is community. The Mental Health Foundation announced this on their blog, citing the importance of having strong social connections in supporting good mental health.

Each year, the Mental Health Foundation announces a specific theme for Mental Health Awareness Week. This theme helps organisations to focus their activities and align their mental health initiatives around a guiding purpose. The theme is usually announced at the beginning of the calendar year, to give HR teams time to plan their activities and communications.

How to plan your company’s Mental Health Awareness Week event programme?

Taking the current year’s theme into account can be a great starting point for generating ideas for your programme of events.

Before diving into planning, consider two critical aspects:

1. Budget Strategy:

There are two common approaches to mental health initiative planning, each with its own challenges:

Budget-First Approach:

Some companies secure their wellness budget first, then plan within those constraints. This can provide clarity but may limit creative solutions.

Plan-First Approach:

Other organisations develop comprehensive plans before seeking budget approval. While this allows for more innovative thinking, it comes with significant risks:

• Potential rejection of funding after investing substantial time in the planning phase with potential suppliers
• Lost productivity and team hours spent on detailed proposals for initiatives that may not materialise
• Frustration when carefully crafted plans are shelved

This highlights why it’s crucial to at least get preliminary budget ranges before investing significant time in detailed planning. Even a rough indication of available budget can help teams channel their efforts more productively. Many organisations find success with a hybrid approach – developing high-level concepts first, getting preliminary budget approval, and then diving into detailed planning once they have a clearer sense of the resources available to them.

2. Programme Development:

Ideally, you’ll want to build on previous successes, evolving what worked in the past well based on:

• Pulse survey results (quick, regular feedback that captures employee sentiment)
• Anecdotal feedback from participants
• Engagement data from past initiatives
• Health-related metrics, such as stress-related absences

Pay particular attention to recurring themes in employee feedback. Whether it’s musculoskeletal complaints or a jump in stress-related absences, use this data to identify trends. Even if budget constraints limit your options, understanding these patterns helps to prioritise the most impactful interventions.

For companies with smaller budgets, consider focusing on in-house team-building activities that align with the year’s theme. This might include peer support groups, walking or running clubs, or skill-sharing sessions that leverage the expertise of colleagues.

What events and activities can HR organise for Mental Health Awareness Week?

When curating your week of events for Mental Health Awareness Week, you can broadly think of your activities as falling into three main areas:

1. Informative

• Expert-led workshops, seminars, and webinars
• Resource sharing sessions
• Mental health first aid training

2. Team-building

• Group discussions and sharing circles
• Peer support sessions
• Team challenges
• Fun or novel activities

3. Immersive

• Fitness classes
• Mindfulness classes
• Sound baths

Remember that body-based approaches to mental wellbeing have their place too during Mental Health Awareness Week. Yoga and Pilates classes are both excellent activities for calming the mind and letting go of stress.

Creating an Inclusive Programme:

Remember that mental health support is not one-size-fits-all. When planning your activities:

• Offer a mix of in-person and virtual options to accommodate remote workers and different comfort levels
• For virtual sessions, offer recordings where available, and closed-captioning for those hard of hearing
• Schedule events at various times to include different shift patterns and time zones
• Consider cultural differences in how mental health is discussed and understood
• Provide multiple ways to participate – some may prefer group settings while others might engage better one-to-one
• Offer alternatives to traditional fitness classes, as not everyone may feel comfortable or able to participate in physical sessions. Chair-based classes can often be adapted to provide modifications for fully seated participation

How soon and when to book activities for Mental Health Awareness Week?

Mental Health Awareness Week is an exceptionally busy week of the calendar year for providers in the corporate wellness space. Planning ahead is crucial to secure your preferred activities and time slots with in-demand vendors.

For in-person sessions, aim to book 1-3 months in advance. With hybrid work continuing to be the norm for many businesses, Tuesday to Thursday are typically the busiest days for office-based activities, with lunchtime slots (12-2:30pm) usually the first to get fully booked. It’s never too early to book – some of our clients begin their planning as early as January!

For remote and hybrid teams, Mondays and Fridays are popular days for virtual sessions. When planning virtual sessions, remember to consider time zones if working with global teams. Virtual sessions can often be booked more flexibly in the weeks and days leading up to Mental Health Awareness Week, especially if you are flexible on timings.

How to promote Mental Health Awareness Week in the workplace?

If HRs had a pound for every time they heard the complaint “no one told us about that”… This could easily be its own blog post but, in a nutshell, more (reminders, channels, updates) isn’t always better. In fact, the opposite is often true – communication overload can backfire, leading to message fatigue and lower engagement.

For best results, there are two critical aspects to get right: the timing and the channel.

Timing:

Ensure you time your communications carefully. If your message lands at a time when colleagues are busy trying to hit their month-end targets, it’s likely to go unread. Certain weeks of the year, emails are met with more out-of-office messages than others. For that reason, consider avoiding school half-term holidays and weeks with a Bank Holiday.

Channel:

Before adopting a ‘spray and pray’ approach, take a step back and consider:

• Does your company have an instant-messaging culture, where Slack or Teams is the go-to for important updates?
• Do you have high-traffic areas in your office where posters could attract attention?
• Does anyone actually read the staff intranet anymore? (Be honest!)
• Which previous communications got the most engagement, and why?

How to measure the impact of workplace mental health initiatives?

Surveys are a vital tool for measuring the impact of your Mental Health Awareness Week activities. It could be as simple as asking which aspects of an activity participants found the most value in, and if there were any that missed the mark.

To generate a strong response, aim to collect feedback immediately after the session, or at the end of the week if taking a more global view. Providing pencils and print-outs of your survey can be an effective, if slightly environmentally-problematic, approach to capturing feedback. Consider providing a QR code in the room where the event is taking place if offering the survey digitally, or a link in the meeting chat if the the event is virtual. Many corporate wellness providers will offer feedback measurement as part of the packages they offer.

Qualitative, anecdotal feedback is worth tracking too, and can be recorded via the forms or more informally. Encourage team leads to share their observations with you.

While it can be tempting to measure the long-term impact of a campaign like Mental Health Awareness Week, the reality is that metrics like absence rates, employee retention, and engagement scores are influenced by too many factors for this to be a fruitful endeavour.

What budget should companies allocate for mental health awareness activities?

When allocating budget for your company’s Mental Health Awareness Week, keep in mind that your largest cost will be the collective time your employees are spending away from their desks. Therefore, when planning your Mental Health Awareness Week budget, consider both direct costs (such as external providers and materials) and the investment of employee time (both yours, as the organisers, and your colleagues’, as the attendees).

When comparing quotes, the lowest-cost provider may catch your eye, but price differences often represent a relatively small amount compared to the total resource being dedicated to these sessions. For example, when bringing together 50 employees for an hour-long session, the difference between provider quotes might be £50-500 – a trivial amount compared to the overall investment in employee time and potential impact of the session.

Focus on selecting providers based on their expertise, track record, and ability to deliver meaningful impact rather than choosing solely on price. A well-curated programme will have a positive knock-on effect on your employees’ wellbeing and engagement that far outweighs its cost.

How to continue mental health support beyond awareness week?

Remember, Mental Health Awareness Week is only one week of the year! In an ideal world, it sits as part of a year-round strategy that makes employee wellbeing a priority. Rather than viewing it as a standalone event, think of it as an opportunity to launch new initiatives, reinforce existing support systems, and showcase your company’s ongoing commitment to mental health.

Use the momentum and engagement from Mental Health Awareness Week to build lasting change. Take note of which activities resonated most with employees and consider how to incorporate them on a more consistent basis. For example, if lunchtime mindfulness sessions were popular, could these become a regular fixture? If your Mental Health First Aiders were particularly active during the week, how can you maintain their visibility year-round? The key is to create sustainable, accessible support systems that become woven into the fabric of your company culture, rather than relying on one-off events to carry the weight of your mental health strategy.

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