World Mental Health Day is 10 October.
What to say to someone who is struggling
The default is “let me know if you need anything”, and it is almost always well meant. It also quietly hands the entire task to the person who is least able to do it: they now have to identify a need, judge whether it's reasonable, and ask. Most won't.
What helps more is specific and unconditional. Naming something true about them that has nothing to do with their current state — their steadiness, their humour, the fact that they've survived worse — gives them something solid at a moment when their own account of themselves has gone unreliable.
None of this is treatment, and nobody should pretend otherwise. If someone is in real difficulty they need proper support, and a kind message is not a substitute for it. But being reminded that you are seen, by someone who took the trouble, is not nothing either.
“Let me know if you need anything” asks the struggling person to do the work. Saying one true, specific thing asks nothing of them at all.
Four that fit the occasion
Taken from the bank we actually send. Use the words yourself, or have one delivered anonymously.
You have already survived what you were sure would break you
PersonalLook back a few years. There was a version of you who could not imagine getting through the thing you have since gotten through. You did it anyway, mostly unimpressively, one ordinary day at a time. That is exactly how you'll get through the next one.
Try speaking to yourself the way you speak to your friends
PersonalYou extend an enormous amount of patience outward and almost none of it back to yourself. If a friend described your week to you, you would not call them lazy or behind. You'd tell them they were doing their best in a hard stretch. That is also true when it's you.
You are doing better than you think
PersonalIf you are getting through the day at all right now, that is the achievement, and it does not need to look like anything more than that. There is no schedule for this. Nobody is grading you.
You do not have to be impressive to be worth knowing
PersonalThe people who love you were not persuaded by your achievements and would not be un-persuaded by their absence. You could do nothing notable for a year and remain exactly as valuable to them. That is what it means that they actually know you.
Or let someone hear it without knowing it was you
A dollar sends one now. Five a month sends a different one every day, at a time you choose.
Other occasions
- What to actually say on Employee Appreciation Day — The first Friday in March.
- Random Acts of Kindness Day, done properly — 17 February each year.
- What to write to a teacher — The first full week of May.