On a sunny Tuesday morning, four enthusiastic students sat down for an interview about WHOLE Churchill. WHOLE Churchill is a community created by Haroon M., Megan C., Rahul A., and Sidharth S., to promote awareness of mental health for all youth, starting with the students of Sir Winston Churchill High School.
Shruti: What is WHOLE Churchill?
Haroon: WHOLE Churchill is an initiative created by us to address mental illness stigma within Sir Winston Churchill High School (SWC). There are quite a lot of students who are stressed by the workload, especially students in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. There are outlets and we were sure that these students aren’t aware of these outlets. So we created this community to address this issue and to provide ways for students and let them know that this is the help that is available, and this is how we can help them.
Shruti: What inspired you to create WHOLE Churchill?
Megan: It began with the wellness of students in the morning and during exams and how tired and stressed we all are. We wanted the whole student body to be involved in this, so we came up with fun activities. This is helpful, because even if the students do not get any of the information on mental health, they could still relax and take their mind off of stressful things for a little while.
Shruti: How many members do you have so far?
Sidharth: So we have a central committee of four members. We work closely with Youth Central’s Youth Volunteer Corps, with Haroon being on the steering committee, and he helps us get volunteers to help run our events. We are starting as a small committee right now, but we are planning to expand and take this further, in the near future as well.
Shruti: What do you think is the biggest issue with mental illness is today?
Haroon: Well, about 3 million youth, from ages 12-19 in Canada are affected by mental illness. You can find more information on youth mental illness from the Canadian Mental Health Association. Mental illness isn’t given much of a glance at in high school, unlike in universities. There was a student from Crescent Heights High School, Brett Rothery; his hashtag #CHHSLetsTalk went viral and people became aware that there are high schools that need these outlets.
Rahul: There is a lack of understanding with how serious of an issue this really is. Most people connect mental health with Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimers; the major ones that occur typically towards the end of life. But even at a young age, anxiety and simple stress are factors that high school students, and people in the educational environment experience all the time. We believe that by paying attention to some of the simplest stages, we can prepare for some of these issues later in life.
Shruti: How can we, as youth, help with this?
Rahul: We need to be more accepting. We need to acknowledge the issue because people don’t really want to talk about it. No one wants to say, “I am struggling with a mental disease and this will impact my life negatively.” If people know that society will accept them and that there are resources out there, they wouldn’t be as reluctant to take steps to help themselves.
Megan: A lot of students joke around saying things like, “Oh kill me now, I have so many things to do!”, and things like that, they don’t realize how harmful it is as someone may really be thinking of doing something like that. So we need to stop using that kind of language.
Rahul: Yeah, for example, if I say, “I’m going to kill myself”, we all know that I’m not actually going to kill myself. But if someone really meant it and everyone thought they were just joking, it misses the whole point of helping that person, and others like them.
Shruti: I agree. Well, this interview is coming to a close, so do you have any last comments?
Haroon: We not only want to let students in our high school know about this issue, but also students in other high schools and tackle problems like this.
Rahul: If this extends beyond our school, that’s when we have really achieved our goal.
Sidharth: You work with Youth Are Awesome right? It’s just an another outlet with who we can start this discussion with. We think that by starting such an initiative with SWC, we can get other high schools to have a community like this as well.
Megan: Although people might say, “Oh this can never happen to me I can deal with all this stress!” But this is something that we all struggle with! We just want to raise awareness that it can happen to anyone.
