Local student leaders make strides to tackle mental health awareness

BY BRYCE KELLY

Mt. Pleasant News

Student leaders at Mt. Pleasant High School are making strides to break the silence on mental illness and say they need parents and teachers alike to help them in their efforts.

The Mt. Pleasant High School Leadership Group, a group of roughly eight students, has pulled together various community resources to host an upcoming forum to raise awareness on mental health and say they hope to see a strong turnout ? especially from adults.

?The thing I really posed to this group was for them to find an issue in their school that was related to mental or behavioral health and address it,? said group coordinator, Chris Kempker, ISU Extension Tobacco Prevention/Youth Development Coordinator, who has been leading the group since it was formed last year. ?When they started discussing it, they came back and said that stress, anxiety, self-harm and depression were really big issues.?

The point of the leadership group, according to Kempker, is to develop leadership skills within local high school students and teach students how to produce needed changes within the student body in a positive way. The group is open to all Mt. Pleasant high school students who wish to participate.

As part of the upcoming forum on Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 7 p.m., at the high school, the leadership group has invited a panel of mental health experts, as well as individuals who have dealt with mental health issues, to discuss and provide insight on how to cope with mental health issues. The forum will also provide a time for a Q and A session, and is being geared primarily towards parents, guardians and adults who work with and/or mentor minors.

?I know that a lot of Mt. Pleasant students are excited that this is finally being talked about openly and a lot of us think it?s a long overdue conversation,? said group member Riley Kempker, who insisted that many students at Mt. Pleasant High School can get emotional when they discuss these issues because the student body has been deeply effected by depression and suicide. ?Hopefully, we can break down barriers that keeps us from talking about this stuff.?

According to a group-organized survey, many Mt. Pleasant students feel that parents and adults don?t fully understand the seriousness of mental illness, depression and anxiety among teens. In addition, students reported feeling unable to talk with adults about their struggles with these issues for fear of being misunderstood or negatively judged.

?A lot of teenagers our age need their parents to know they are struggling, but they don?t know how to tell them in a way parents will understand,? said Mt. Pleasant student Kalista Wilson, who is also a member of the leadership group. ?So, a lot of students self-harm or do other destructive behavior in hopes that someone will take notice, which is what we really want to address and change.?

In addition to the upcoming forum, the group has also organized a variety of other activities within the student body to creatively address mental health, while also promoting positive behaviors. The student group has even reached out to the local middle school and spoken with eighth-graders to help ease stress about their upcoming transition into high school.

Overall, Kempker says that she is proud of the group?s mature handling of these issues and says she hopes the community will help support her students in their efforts to effect positive change in their school district.

?Having conversations about these issues isn?t a bad thing,? Kempker says. ?These students want to educate the community about these hurdles that they have to jump through and how we as a community can help students live better.?

For more information about the upcoming forum or about the Mt. Pleasant High School Leadership Group, call 319-385-8126.