Teddy Bears’ Picnic expands mental-health component

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This article was published 24/05/2018 (2162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Children’s mental health will be front and centre Sunday at the annual Teddy Bears’ Picnic in Winnipeg.

The Worry Bear Tent that appeared for the first time last year is being moved from the edge of the family fun day at Assiniboine Park to beside the main attraction, the Dr. Goodbear Clinic, where children take their teddy bears for an annual checkup.

“It was such a popular hit last year,” said Tanya Williams, communications and marketing director for the Children’s Hospital Foundation of Manitoba, which has hosted the event for 32 years. The event introduces children to many aspects of health care, with their stuffed animals undergoing a variety of tests.

“We’ve expanded the Worry Bear Tent because we had so many people lined up (to get into it) last year,” Williams said Thursday. “We’ve put it with Dr. Goodbear this year because it’s part of your child’s health. Parents are looking for ways to cope with their children’s anxiety.”

Worry Bear Tent’s chief of staff, Dr. Rehman Abdulrehman, said it’s part of a shift in which mental health is losing some of its stigma and gaining ground. At last year’s picnic, people were asking for help, and prepared to wait for it.

“We had huge lineups of people standing in the rain waiting to come in for service. That spoke volumes about the need for this,” the clinical psychologist and director of Clinic Psychology Manitoba said.

“Parents of kids who were already getting help said, ‘We’re so happy you’re doing this — it addresses the issue of stigma so strongly and it does it so nicely.’”

This year, Abdulrehman said he asked event organizers for more room and a more central location for the Worry Bear Tent.

“The point of this was that we wanted to make a statement that mental health is just as important as our physical health,” he said.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority cites the World Health Organization in its mental-health material, saying, “There is no health without mental health,” Abdulrehman said. “They were very kind, and offered us a larger tent right next to the Dr. Goodbear Clinic.”

More than 45 tents will be set up at Assiniboine Park to offer a fun and educational experience, with entertainment for the whole family, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Hundreds of volunteers at the event include doctors, nurses — and a half-dozen clinical psychologists at the Worry Bear Tent.

There they will ask children to describe what’s worrying them by drawing a “worry cloud,” and talking about what they could do to shrink it, so the worry is not so big. For parents, the Worry Bear Tent is providing takeaway materials with tips for managing their child’s anxiety.

“The point of this tent is to make knowledge about mental health public,” Abdulrehman said. “This is a public health initiative.

“We know that up to 70 per cent of adult mental-health difficulties start in childhood,” he said. “The most common one is anxiety, which is why we’re doing the Worry Bear Tent.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca