An author, who is an expert in teenage mental health, marked the culmination of an innovative new campaign by Moray school pupils.
Nicola Morgan has written a series of non-fiction books which offer advice to youngsters on how best to deal with stress and anxiety.
She headlined a conference which was principal event of the Moray Minds campaign, designed to help the region’s teenagers deal with their mental health.
It is a scheme that involves all eight secondary schools in the region, with 30 young ambassadors volunteering to be trained by health experts and then using these skills to become advocates for mental wellbeing.
They have been working on projects since November to heighten awareness of the stresses which pupils experience on a daily basis.
At Elgin Academy, the ambassadors are planning to build a flourish area, where children can go to relax with a box of items to help them achieve that, including lavender oil.
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Ms Morgan was impressed at how much effort the pupils had put in since November.
She said: “It’s a hugely important topic and I do this because, when I was a teenager and through my twenties and thirties, I didn’t have good mental health and lost a lot of school time and work time through stress-related illnesses.
“I now know how I could have prevented that, so what I do now is try and help young people have those skills and know the things I wish I could have known.”
The Moray school librarians received a grant of £7,500 from the Scottish Government through their School Library Improvement Fund (SLIF)to work with partners in the region to promote mental wellbeing for Moray’s young people.
Elgin Academy librarian Shelagh Toonen hopes that the ambassadors can take what they have learnt and carry on raising awareness.
She said: “We are looking at continuing this in the future and passing the baton on to the next cohorts and developing a toolbox of strategies and resources that everybody can use.”
Sky Ritchie, an Elgin High School ambassador, was pleased to be a part of the campaign and everything they had achieved.
She said: “I wanted to help out because a lot of people are not aware of how mental health affects people and it is something really interesting to do.”
