Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 (Monday 12th – Sunday 18th July 2025) is upon us once again, this year with a focus on community. Taking a lead in the campaign, the Mental Health Foundation have said:

“At the Mental Health Foundation we are committed to creating a world where there is good mental health for all. We do this by focusing on preventing poor mental health alongside building and protecting good mental health.  

"We know that being part of a community is vital for our mental health and wellbeing. We thrive when we have strong connections with others and supportive communities around us.”

As the (fairly) newly in post Wilder Wellbeing Officer for Somerset Wildlife Trust, this focus has set me thinking on where nature and our human nature meet, and why re-connecting with natural spaces in community can have such a healing effect on our emotional and mental wellbeing. 

‘Good Nature’?

Instinctively we know that spending time in the deep green wood is good for us: our health, our wellbeing and our souls.

Science and researchers are working hard to provide the evidence base to match our intuition, with a vital study being undertaken over decades by Dr Qing Lee of Nippon Medical School, exploring the myriad benefits of forest bathing (Shinrin-Yoku), and more recent developments evidencing the importance of nature connectedness by Miles Richardson et al at the University of Derby.

In her recent book ‘Good Nature’, Dr Kathy Willis (professor of Biodiversity at Oxford University no less!) brings together recent scientific evidence to offer a strong case for the benefits in one (very readable) treatise. The emerging science seems clear: 

It is suggested, for example, that two hours spent in nature can be a way to kickstart all kinds of potential health benefits. 

In a 2021 study undertaken by the Mental Health Foundation – ‘Nature: How connecting with nature benefits our mental health’ – the resounding results were that “70% of UK adults surveyed agreed that being close to nature improves their mood and 49% said being close to nature helps them to cope with stress. A further 57% said they experience the benefits of nature while they go about their daily lives, and 30% agreed that even watching or listening to nature documentaries on TV or radio has a positive impact on their mental health”.

When times are tough?

As someone with my own life-long mental health and trauma-informed challenges I have always, on an instinctive level, understood the powerful role the natural environment has in terms of supporting my own wellbeing and at times, survival, feeling an affinity to the wilder places that have often matched my inner landscape. Nature has never judged me for being broken, bereft or lost in my grief. Nature has offered soothing, containment, and perhaps at times some much-needed sense of perspective of my positioning in the wider scheme of living beings.

When reflecting on events like Mental Health Awareness Week, it is important to me that we hold in mind the pain and distress that can go alongside the more joyful and celebratory images that ‘wellbeing’ conjures up, paying attention to the one in four of us who will struggle so acutely that they will need the help of specialist intervention over the course of a lifetime. In the last few weeks, I have had conversations with people who have told me about how connection with nature has supported them through the bleakest of times; a bereavement, a breakdown, a partner’s life-changing physical illness. As with being in a forest, we need to become more comfortable in the shadows to fully experience and appreciate light when it breaks through the leaf cover. 

Nature, resilience and joy!

That said, there is also so much potential for joy when we allow ourselves the space and time to lean into nature, fully embracing the wonder possible when we pause and take notice. Kristen Lambert, Wilder Lives Manager at Somerset Wildlife Trust says: “Access to nature can be a powerful tool for helping people learn new skills, gain confidence, relax, communicate with others and be present – which can all help to manage and improve mental health and wellbeing”.

Attention Restoration Theory suggests that we can allow our minds to rest in the ‘soft fascination’ that nature so bountifully offers, providing balance and renewal for our cognitively demanding modern lives. A recent group led by a colleague were invited to ‘take photos’, instructing each other to open and close eyes as if a lens to capture a point of beauty in the surroundings. The laughter and expressions of delight in this simple activity were captivating to witness as we all saw the world fresh through another person’s eyes. 

The Five pathways to nature connectedness talk about our need to make contact with nature via our senses to help notice beauty and our emotional responses to the wildlife around us. We are also invited to explore the meaning that nature has, building compassion for ourselves, each other, and the natural world as a result. My experience volunteering with the wonderful Nature Connections groups previously offered by Somerset Wildlife Trust demonstrated fully and repeatedly the value for us all of the five pathways in maintaining and improving wellbeing, with the discoveries made providing a source of resilience for life.

Webs of connections and communities

Working with Somerset Wildlife Trust over these past six months has given me multiple opportunities to observe the powerful connection that happens when people meet together for nature. Conversations flow as discoveries are shared and interests ignited. It seems to me that being in nature and becoming of nature feeds wellbeing most fully when offered in community.

Just as we connect with nature, we connect with each other in a powerful dynamic, bringing the chance for transformative change and renewal in our communities. Differences fade when we tell tales of first memories of nature, favourite flowers, most loved landscapes, becoming connected by the humanity we all share in nature. There is work to do. Studies suggest that some folk are less welcomed into natural spaces, and quality urban nature needs to be part of the picture, but the hope remains that collectively we can facilitate webs of connection that provide corridors of natural opportunities for all to equally access and benefit from.

Compassionate nature?

To connect with nature, we need nature. On this planet we call home, we need all the natural spaces to thrive. One of my deepest hopes in facilitating nature-based wellbeing alongside the communities of Somerset is that I can assist the ever-growing movement bridging people’s experience towards the joyful and healing. These factors come with developing a closer relationship with nature, and I hope that this in turn may inspire meaningful action for nature herself.

Connecting with nature invites us as human beings to cease seeing ourselves as other and separate from the more-than human world. This requires us to act as if we are a part of nature, not other from it, and promotes the deep ecological necessary to inter-be, protecting the body that is ‘earth’ as if it is inseparable from our own body. This in turn empowers us as individuals to invest in the environment around us and take steps to reverse nature depletion, becoming part of meaningful recovery for our amazing, wonderous, green and blue Somerset spaces. 

I am immensely grateful to Somerset Wildlife Trust and Team Wilder for recognising this possibility, and passionately committed to playing my own small part in the vital task that lies ahead of us.

Further reading

• Why is community important for our mental health and wellbeing? | Mental Health Foundation
• The Nature Connection Handbook
• Into the Forest | Qing Li
• Reconnection | Miles Richardson
• Good Nature | Kathy Willis