Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

03/06/2026

✍️ Writing Competition Now Open!

Submit your new writing inspired by mental health and our theme of Reflections. This year, the competition is open to writers based in Scotland.

There are three categories and you can submit one piece in each category:

FICTION (500–2000 words)
POETRY (Up to 40 lines)
CREATIVE NON-FICTION (500–2000 words)

There will also be a new prize for a young writer:

YOUNG WRITER PRIZE (Aged 16–25, any category)

🗓️ The closing date for the competition is Sun 7 Aug 2026.

🔗 www.mhfestival.com/writing-competition

Led by Supported by Multi-Year Funding from .

Enter the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival's 2025 Writing Competition with new writing inspired by mental health and our theme of 'Comfort & Disturb'.

22/05/2026

💭 Join us for our next Mental Health Arts Network event, where we'll be exploring why creativity is such a powerful tool for talking to children and young people about mental health.

Hear from children's author and playwright Ross MacKay and theatre director Lu Kemp about their experiences addressing the most difficult of subjects in a way that is accessible and fun.

📅 Tuesday 26 May, 1–3pm
📍 Zoom
🎟️ tikt.link/mhanchildren

Register for free using the booking link or the events page on our website.

How can creativity be used to talk to children and young people about mental health? With children's author and playwright Ross Mackay and theatre director Lu Kemp.

20/05/2026

💭 Join us for our next Mental Health Arts Network event, where we’ll be exploring why creativity is such a powerful tool for talking to children and young people about mental health.

Hear from children’s author and playwright and theatre director about their experiences addressing the most difficult of subjects in a way that is accessible and fun.

📅 Tuesday 26 May, 1–3pm
📍 Zoom
🎟️ tikt.link/mhanchildren

Register for free using the booking link or the events page on our website.

12/05/2026

💬 Join us for our next Mental Health Arts Network session.

Creativity can be a powerful tool for talking to children and young people about mental health.

In this online event, we talk to children’s author and playwright Ross MacKay and theatre director Lu Kemp about addressing the most difficult of subjects in a way that is accessible and fun.

Afterwards there will be an opportunity for everyone attending to discuss the issues raised, as well as their own projects.

🗓️ Tuesday 26 May, 1–3pm
📍 Zoom
🎟️ Register at tikt.link/mhanchildren

How can creativity be used to talk to children and young people about mental health? With children's author and playwright Ross Mackay and theatre director Lu Kemp.

08/05/2026

💬 Our theme this year is Reflections, and want to hear from people who have been part of the festival over the past 20 years!

Many thousands of audience members, artists, participants, partners and volunteers have shaped SMHAF across Scotland, through events, exhibitions, workshops, films, performances.

Your story might be about:

🪩 An event that has stayed with you
🎟️ Your first experience of SMHAF
🤗 What it means to be involved
💚 How creativity supports your mental health

We’ll be sharing your reflections gradually over the coming months across our digital platforms, helping to celebrate our history while looking ahead to what comes next.

🔗 Submit your story at https://www.mhfestival.com/2026/05/share-your-smhaf-story-reflections-on-20-years-of-arts-and-mental-health/.

👉 You can also get involved by commenting on this post, or sharing your reflection in a post or story and tagging us.

28/04/2026

🫶 Young artist commission open for applications!

The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival is seeking proposals for a new young artist commission, with a fee of £1,000 inclusive of materials.

This opportunity is open to people aged 18-25 based anywhere in Scotland and working in any discipline, as long as the work addresses mental health and responds to this year’s theme of Reflections.

It is expected that applicants will have experience of making creative work but this does not need to have been in a professional or formal education setting.

🔗 Find out more and apply at mhfestival.com.

23/04/2026

📍 Regional Participatory Arts Fund

We’re inviting applications for our small grants scheme to support participatory arts projects taking place at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2026.

This year, we will have a strategic focus on Perth, Stirling, and towns and rural areas across Scotland. The fund will support at least ten projects overall.

Projects should respond in some way to our theme, Reflections, and the work should be showcased during this year’s festival dates, 19 October to 8 November 2026.

💷 Grants: £750 to £1,250
📅 Deadline: Friday 29 May

Apply here: https://www.mhfestival.com/2026/04/call-for-applications-smhaf-2026-regional-participatory-arts-fund/.

This project is supported by the Baring Foundation and Multi-Year Funding from Creative Scotland.

21/04/2026

Home Cooking is next up from the ’s Art of Family Life creative workshop programme.

Cooking and food-sharing is such a communal kind of connection. We cook to nourish our loved ones, to introduce ourselves to others through dishes, and to preserve parts of our identity that are important to us.

Led by this series of six workshops will include shared cooking sessions that explore ideas of connection – to home, to ourselves’, and to each other – through recipe-sharing and food storytelling.

By cooking together in a gentle environment, having conversations around the role of food in connecting to ‘home’, and sharing recipes with each other, we’ll explore how cooking can present ways that the idea of ‘home’ is more than a place.

Open to anyone based in Glasgow with lived and/or intergenerational experience of forced displacement / seeking refugee protection.

No previous experience of cooking is necessary, but it is very welcome. Limited places available.

📍 Gathering Ground, Old Basin House, 5 Applecross Street, G4 9SP

🗓️ Tuesdays 11am–1pm from 19 May–23 June 2026

🫒 Lunch and travel expenses included. Childcare and interpreter support are available on request.

✉️ Please get in touch with Soizig at [email protected] or on 07702 671 965.