MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND
Mental Health is a serious issue that affects a large amount of high school and college students. Certain mental health disorders like depression and anxiety cause a student to deal with a variety of negative thoughts and emotions, like feelings of worthlessness, loneliness, intense sadness and more. Mental health problems have been found to cause a students ability to grow academically, socially and psychologically, holding them back from developing properly. Specifically, when looking at education, mental health problems cause a student to suffer drastically in their ability to learn information, retain that information, and then prepare and perform on assignments. This can cause a students grades and GPA to drop dramatically, leading to consequences as severe as suicide. Overall, mental health is a topic that must be focused on in order to help students better deal with their own mental health disorders.
IMPLEMENTATION AND DIRECTION
With help from the American University Mental Health Initiative, an on campus mental health group that focuses on solving problems with American University students, we focused on suicide prevention. The reason I decided to take this path is because suicide prevention is one step to helping students deal with their mental illness. Many students who are suicidal are dealing with mental illness, meaning that if we are able to teach students to help their peers with dealing with hardship, then that would be a large step in the right direction. With this new direction in mind, I decided to reach out to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to figure out a way one of their instructors could present for American University students.
MY PROJECT: TALK SAVES LIVES
Talk Save Lives is a presentation presented by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention centered around teaching people about the general scope of suicide. Working with instructor Robert Asmar, we got together with American University Students to teach them about suicide, who it affects, what we know about it and what can be done to prevent it. The presentation taught a lot of important information about suicide information and prevention techniques that is not commonly known or taught. The presentation and my project was a success and had a lasting impact on the students that choose to attend the event, allowing them to use and express their new knowledge to help other American University students better understand suicide as well. This is the first time that Talk Save Lives was presented at American University, but hopefully the presentation and my project will start a trend more openly about suicide in a safe environment at American University.
CHALLENGES DURING THE PROCESS
Initially, going in a different direction with my project, I had a lot of trouble finding an organization to host an event or presentation on campus that required little to no funding. I first reached out to The National Council for Behavioral Health to present a program they have called National Health First Aid for Higher Education. While this presentation would have been the most ideal, the cost in order to fund the presentation was above the amount that a college student would’ve been able to access. Because of this, I decided to move away from this option. This set me back, as I put a lot of my time and effort into getting that presentation to work. Another problem I had throughout was finding a time that would best work for everyone, as I had multiple groups, including the American University Mental Health Imitative and The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention teams to work out times with, which caused scheduling issues but overall worked out.