May is Mental Health Awareness Month! This month is very important because it is dedicated to educating the public on mental illnesses, the reality of living with a mental health condition, and strategies to attain wellness.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of stigma around mental health conditions. The definition of stigma is a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. Examples of this include thinking that someone with a mental health condition is dangerous, or less of a person. Mental illnesses are more common than one would think, for 1 in 5 children ages 13-18 have or will have a serious mental illness in the future.
Seniors Faith Moseley, Bailey Thoma, and I (Isabel Olivas), are working to ensure that Mental health Awareness Month at Minarets is going to be great. A few things we have planned are to have NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, come down to Minarets and give an “Ending the Silence” presentation. “Ending the Silence” is an engaging 50 minute presentation that helps the audience members learn about warning signs of mental health conditions and what to do when a friend or family member is showing symptoms. During the last 10 minutes of this presentation, a young adult presenter will share their experience with mental illness. Through training, I, Isabel Olivas, am now qualified to be the young adult presenter and I will be presenting with NAMI on May 9th during the 3rd and 7th period Psychology classes.
Something else that we had planned was that we sent out a school survey about general questions related to mental health conditions. Once we got the feedback from our peers, we made posters of the statistics of their answers and placed them around the school.
The moral of this event is that we all have mental health, and it is important that we help those who have mental health conditions. We can do this by being there for each other and talking openly about mental illness together.