By: Nethali Reid, 11C
Globally, October is known as National Depression and Mental Health Awareness Month. The goal is encouraging individuals to seek help, promoting understanding, and reducing stigma around mental health. Mental health is a state of mental well-being, encompassing the ability to cope with life’s stresses, realize one’s abilities, learn and work effectively, and contribute to one’s community. This month, AHSS decided to bring awareness about it to high schoolers who struggle with mental health.
The organization Mind Clinic was invited to our school, and Dr. Dunia Salameh held an assembly to help talk about the importance of mental health and ways to deal with it. On October 12th, students and teachers wore green to show support.
Mental health has a lot of stigma, a set of negative attitudes, stereotypes, and discriminations that people with mental health conditions experience. Jordan struggles with it especially, which makes it hard for young people to feel safe enough to talk about their struggles publicly. Young people around their teenage years go through many struggles with school and, in general, the awkward phase of everything about them changing. The stresses of societal expectations, academic struggles, parental pressures, and the need for validation from your peers are some of the struggles teens face.
Dr. Dunia spoke on how students need each other because no one understands more than someone who is going through the same thing as you. Students were asked questions and raised their hands when they experienced like stressors and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Then they were told to look around the room and realized that people share more of the same struggles than they may have thought.
Seeking help for the struggles we face is very, very difficult. A feeling of weakness and vulnerability isn’t easy, but it is necessary to heal and try and get better. We encourage students to seek help from a parent, teacher, guidance counselor, trusted adult, or a professional. Especially when experiencing loss of interest in hobbies, extreme fatigue, lack of appetite, or increased appetite, hurting themselves, or thoughts of suicide. Things can and will get better; you can do this!
Interview
Q: What’s something about mental health most people disregard or have an unrealistic expectation about?
A: I don’t think everyone realizes that everyone has mental health. Just like everyone has physical health; everyone has mental health. It’s easy to disregard the fact that we all have mental health. Mental health doesn’t mean mental illness, it’s different, just like we all have physical health to take care of, we all have a brain and emotions, which means you have mental health. So, that’s where the stigma comes in, because if I disregard that mental health doesn’t exist then I also disregard any sort of mental illness I have.
Q: Why did you decide to make mental health awareness your job?
A: Because it’s stigmatized, and because not everyone looks and it and is encouraging others to take a deeper look at it. I feel like it’s something I can see and understand how difficult it is, and because I understand how difficult mental health is to keep healthy, it’s important to me to spread that knowledge. In the same way I would tell you for your physical health to exercise, I would want to tell you to for your mental health, you need to do things to make you happy. And because of the stigma in that aspect, I would want to be the one who says no, no, it’s normal to feel that way. I want us all to talk about it, and normalize talking about it.
Q: What do you think should be implemented in schools or in the lives of young people for mental health?
A: Specifically for schools having a school counseling team that supports students throughout all school years, not necessarily 9th grade and above, but lower. Because stress starts way younger than that, and also stress doesn’t just come from school, it comes from families and a lot of other things in life. At the end of the day, you guys aren’t just students, you’re humans and you’re individuals and you have different parts of your lives that affect you. And having that student counselor team should be in every school.
