Create a Mental Health Podcast – World Mental Health Day 2025 – FREE

FREE Create Your Own Mental Health Podcast – World Mental Health Day 2026

A creative World Mental Health Day activity inviting young people to plan their own mental health podcast, from the conversations they’d start to the voices they’d include and the impact they’d hope to have.

Created for World Mental Health Day 2026, this free activity gives young people the opportunity to imagine and plan their own mental health podcast. They’ll consider the topics they’d discuss, questions they’d ask, people they’d invite and the message they’d want listeners to take away.

It’s a simple way to explore this year’s focus on real voices and lived experiences.

Use it as a standalone classroom activity or pair it with our World Mental Health Day 2026 Secondary School Presentation for a complete lesson.

About this resource

Students are given their own podcast planning sheet with space to create:

• Podcast name
• What it’s about
• First episode title
• What they’ll discuss
• Questions they’d ask
• Their message
• Who they’d invite onto the podcast
• The impact they’d like to have
• A podcast logo

The open-ended format gives students plenty of freedom to take the activity in a direction that interests them.

Features

• FREE printable activity
• Designed for secondary-aged young people / KS3 & KS4
• Created specifically for World Mental Health Day 2026
• Can be completed individually, in pairs or small groups
• No personal mental health disclosure required
• Works as a standalone activity or alongside our Secondary presentation
• Combines mental health education with creativity, communication and critical thinking

Benefits

This activity can help young people:

• Explore mental health topics in a safe and supported environment
• Consider whose voices and experiences are heard
• Think about the importance of listening to different perspectives
• Develop thoughtful questions
• Explore how conversations can influence understanding and change
• Consider the impact they would like their own voice to have

How to incorporate it into your setting

Use during a PSHE lesson, form time, pastoral session, wellbeing lesson or World Mental Health Day activity.

Students could complete the sheet independently, develop a podcast idea in pairs, pitch their podcast to a group or even turn their plan into a short recorded episode if appropriate for your setting.

For a full lesson, use it as the final activity after our Secondary World Mental Health Day Presentation.

What is the World Mental Health Day 2026 theme?

The World Federation for Mental Health has announced the official theme for World Mental Health Day 2026 as:

“Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.”

The theme puts the focus on listening to people with lived experience. Real experiences can give us important insight into what people need, what is working and what could be better.

For children and young people, we can explore this in an age-appropriate way: we all experience the world differently, our experiences matter, our voices matter and listening to other people's experiences can help us understand one another better.

Importantly, exploring lived experience in school doesn't mean asking children or young people to disclose personal or difficult experiences. Activities can focus on everyday experiences, preferences, ideas, needs and perspectives while always allowing pupils to choose what they share.

Bringing World Mental Health Day into your school or setting

You don't need to dedicate an entire school day to make World Mental Health Day meaningful.

Use one of these activities during registration or form time, build a full PSHE lesson around one of the presentations, create a pupil-voice display, run small-group discussions, incorporate an activity into pastoral support, or choose different resources for different year groups.

Our free World Mental Health Day resources have deliberately been designed to be mixed, matched and adapted. You can run a complete lesson using one of the presentations, pair a presentation with its accompanying activity, or simply download a free standalone worksheet for a quick World Mental Health Day activity.

The key message running throughout the collection is simple:

We don't all experience the world in the same way. When we make space for different voices and genuinely listen to them, we can understand each other better and use what we learn to make things better.