Mental Health Resources — Tips for Camps

Top Tips for Camps

Establish a mental health support network. Build relationships with community mental health resources prior to your camp season. Have professionals in place that you can contact at any time to help you with mental health issues.
Provide a positive camp environment. Feeling safe is critical to a child’s learning and mental health. Promote positive behaviors such as respect, responsibility, and kindness. Prevent negative behaviors such as bullying and harassment. Provide easily understood rules of conduct and fair discipline practices. Teach campers to work together to stand up to a bully, encourage them to reach out to lonely or excluded peers, celebrate acts of kindness, and reinforce the availability of adult support.
Create a sense of belonging. Feeling connected and welcomed is essential to a child’s positive adjustment, self-identification, and sense of trust in others and themselves. Building strong, positive relationships among campers and staff is important to promoting mental wellness.
Educate staff on the symptoms of and help for mental health problems. Information helps break down the stigma surrounding mental health and enables staff and campers to recognize when to seek help. Your mental health professional network can provide useful information on symptoms of problems like depression or suicide risk. These can include changes in habits, withdrawal, decreased social and academic functioning, erratic or changed behavior, and increased physical complaints.
Establish an incident response team. Being prepared to respond to an incident is important to safeguarding campers’ physical and mental well-being. Incident response teams should include relevant administrators, staff, and mental health professionals who collaborate with community resources.

Tips adapted from Supporting Children’s Mental Health: Tips for Parents and Educators. National Association of School Psychologists.

Courses and Records Webinars

Mental Health Issues in Camp — 90-minute recorded webinar
Practical Tools for Addressing MESH Issues at Camp — 1-hour recorded webinar
Mental Health First Aid — Watch for these courses on the events calendar

Podcasts

Youth Mental Health Through COVID-19 — CampWire Episode 38
Stephen Gray Wallace & Youth Mental Health — CampWire Episode 30

Articles and Advice on Mental Health

Making Mental Health Matter at Camp. Aaron Selkow, Camping Magazine
What Now? Understanding and Supporting Campers with Mental Health Issues. Camping Magazine
Children's Mental Health and Camp: What Is Our Role? Ethan Shagfer, Camping Magazine
Weathering the Changes: Discriminating Mental Health Problems and Normal Developmental Struggles in Hard-to-Reach Campers. Karen P. Carlson, PhD, and Alicia H. McAuliffe-Fogarty, PhD, Camping Magazine
Camper Mental Health. Christopher Thurber, Ph.D., ABPP, and Karen Carlson, Ph.D.
Supporting Children’s Mental Health: Tips for Parents and Educators. National Association of School Psychologists
Toolkit for Community Conversations About Mental Health. MentalHealth.gov
- Diálogos Comunitarios Acerca de la Salud Mental. MentalHealth.gov En Espanol

Articles and Advice on Related Critical Issues

Assessing Suicidality. Christopher Thurber, Ph.D., ABPP
Characteristics of Youth Who Have Caused School-Associated Violent Deaths. National School Safety Center
Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Conduct Disorder in Children and Youth. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Eating Disorders and Camp. Christopher Thurber, Ph.D., ABPP
Help Stop Teen Suicide. American Academy of Pediatrics
Helping Teenagers with Stress. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Self-Injury in Adolescents. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Through Our Eyes: Children, Violence, and Trauma. U.S Department of Justice Office of Victims of Crimes