HOW CAN WE BRING AWARENESS TO SOMETHING SO SERIOUS?

Hello, welcome to my first digital final presentations at GCE! Unfortunately, final presentations were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the show must go on! For our Final Presentations, we were asked to create our very own guiding question based on one of our core classes. So, for my presentation, I am going to explain the importance of mental health and how we can try and bring awareness to that.

My guiding question: how can we bring awareness to something so serious?

Mental illness or mental health is one of the most complex issues in the world, especially for children and teens. It is often ignored and young people are often told to "get over it" or "you're fine" and "it's just a part of life." However, navigating childhood and adolescence can be extremely challenging and it is easy to become overwhelmed, especially when they're handling things like schoolwork, hormones, peer pressure, extracurricular activities, etc. In my experience, teenagers are held to an even higher standard and expected to be something or someone that they are not. More times than not adults and even their peers cannot see all the pressures that that teenagers are under. Due to fear of embarrassment and shame, teenagers tend to hide their issues with humor or mask their true feelings by telling themselves and the world that they are fine.

(This is somewhat what I want the stickers to look like.)

S.S.,  Semicolon, 2020.
 Grammatically, semicolons are for authors who want to end a sentence but decided not to. 
 So this semicolon is a metaphor for people who wanted to end their lives but decided not to.

My desired outcome for this project is to bring more awareness to mental illness, not just as a school but as a society. So, I think passing out stickers would spread the word faster since they are trendy, popular and they easily express a person’s views. On any given day I pass people on the streets, buses, and trains with stickers on water bottles, phone cases and/or laptops. Additionally, many activist organizations pass out stickers as a visual expression of support. I even have several stickers of support for various organizations on my own belongings. And I believe that stickers are small tokens of appreciation to advance the message of big issues.