Mental Health Unit

        Your mental health takes over a big part of your life because your mentality is part of what controls it. Unless your Health class in high school goes into this topic, people are not really enlightened on it.In the past eight weeks, N.E.W School has dug a little deeper and really shown us how your mental health takes part in your life. We have guest speakers come in from time to time that help inform us on what is really going on in not just ours but other peoples head. Sometimes these guest speakers come to us or we watch them on websites like TED talk. Some of the things these guest speakers have talked about are depression, anxiety, PTSD, and how these mental illnesses have lead people to homelessness.
        The second guest speakers that came to our class are two counselors from my school and they came to talk about depression and anxiety. Depression and anxiety are kind of like Mario and Luigi. Sometimes they work together and sometimes they work alone. Depression and anxiety affects 32% of teens and 8.3% are severe impaired. Some of the symptoms for depression are depressed mood and irritability, decreased interest or pleasure in activities, significant weight change or change in appetite and more. The difference between depression and sadness is that sadness is a normal human emotion and can happen because you feel bad about something that happened. Depression can come from brain chemistry, hereditary, environment, stress and others. The percentage of it being hereditary is 30-50%. Anxiety and depression affects every 2/3 girls and every 1/3 boys.
        One of the last things we did for the mental unit I did in class was watch a TED talk about PTSD. A man by the name of Sebastian Junger talked about his PTSD after he came back from fighting a war. His PTSD was short-term but some of the things he experience with PTSD was that the subway was way to fast, there were to many people around him and it was very load. What Junger had said was that if one person dealt with PTSD and was put in surroundings that made it worse, that person would eventually go crazy but if a lot of people were traumatized and put together, the percentage of PTSD becoming worse would go down. For example, when 9/11 happened, the whole city of New York was traumatized, (along with everyone else) and the crime, homicide and the suicide rate went down.
        To tie both of these in, I left the guest speaker for last for a reason. As my mental unit project, my friend Mikaela Myers and I raised money to buy and make homeless packs to give out for the holiday season. Our goal was to bring awareness to our school and outside community about the problem of homelessness and in order to do that we had to bring awareness to our class. A lady named Jennielynn Holmes came to my class to talk about the problem of homelessness. Some of the things she mentioned was that quite a few homeless people suffer from PTSD and are veterans. Not all reasons for homelessness is because of mental problems but also physical problems. 7% is due to physical problems, 31% is due to job lose, 10% is because they lost their house and 15% because that person got a divorce.

        After hearing these three speakers come and talk to the class and us really getting to hear what they had to say really enlightened me. It has made me open my eyes and understand people on a different level. Instead of turning the other way when seeing a homeless person, I turn and give them a smile or what I have to make their day. I'll give them these wonderful homeless packs my classmates helped create. With knowing a little more about anxiety and depression, it's helped me understand myself a little more better. Everything I've learned in these classes the past eight weeks have really opened my eyes to the outside world and to think before judging.