The Association of Professional Party Organisers and Event Managers in Nigeria (APPOEMN) has urged its members to prioritise their mental health amid rising economic hardships in Nigeria.
Olufunbi Akinyosoye, president of APPOEMN, said this on Wednesday at an event organised to mark the association’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Project for 2024 in Lagos.
The event themed, “Taking care of your mental health and mind decluttering”, is part of the APPOEMN’s 7th annual event industry conference.
Speaking on why the association decided on mental health as the theme of the event, Akinyosoye said, “We all know that the prevalent condition of the country is impacting adversely on people’s mental health. And we need to know the kind of people event professionals are, we are the ones creating experiences for people and so we have to be in a better state of mind to be able to create those experiences for people.”
“There’s nothing happening in the world that doesn’t have an event professional doing it. Therefore, the event professional has to be in a great mental state to be able to procure those experiences for the general public to be able to have events.”
She stressed that event planners face a lot of challenges in the course of their businesses, including trying to meet customers’ deadlines.
The president added that many event planners were yet to recover from the effects of the COVID era when their businesses went to zero because there was no event to plan at that time.
Invited to educate members of the association on mental health, Ese Ayaebene, a mental health therapist, stressed the need for Nigerians to prioritise their mental health amid persistent economic crises by “separating things outside of their control from things within their control.”
“There are a lot of things that are happening, but what you need to do is to distinguish what you can control and what you can’t control”, she said.
