Project Need:
Our impact area is health and wellness. Through research, we have learned that there are many kids and adolescents who experience anxiety and depression. Many of these kids do not get treatment for these symptoms. We felt it was important to provide students with positive coping skills for them to rely on.
Our team wants to help our community help kids make better choices for which coping skills they use to manage their symptoms of anxiety and depression. We hope kids will use positive alternatives to cope and there will be a decrease in self harm (i.e. cutting) and use of marijuana. We want to help raise mental health awareness of students, and teach them about its harmful effects on emotional health and academic success. About 80% of adolescents who have anxiety do not get treatment (Service Utilization for Lifetime Mental Disorders in U.S. Adolescents: Results of the National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). Research also shows that 60% of adolescents who have depression do not get treatment (Bittner, A., Goodwin, R. D., Wittchen, H. U., Beesdo, K., Höfler, M., & Lieb, R. (2004).
When doing our research, we noticed that there are not many recent articles on children and adolescents experiencing anxiety and depression. There are even less on the topic of why it is important to speak about it. We found that surprising since gun violence in schools has been so prevalent over the last 10 years and mental health being the common denominator. This is why we felt it was even more important to speak to students and their teachers about these symptoms. We hope that students will feel empowered to let an adult know when they are feeling sad or anxious. We also hope that teachers can remember this information and begin to look at their students as emotional human beings and not just behaviors in the classroom. We hope that students can take away these coping skills and use them on their own before the symptoms become unmanageable.
Our team felt that the this was a very important topic and it was important that younger students knew about this while they are still making a foundation for themselves and are open to trying new things. We visited seven elementary schools and presented to our sixth grade class and encouraged students to practice the coping skills that they learned and to share it with others. We researched statistics and long term effects of depression and anxiety and decided the elementary students would be more open to try our ideas. We want to normalize emotions and take away the stigma that something is wrong if they feel sad or anxious. We wanted to normalize symptoms of anxiety and depression and show kids that they are not alone. Our goal was to provide students with positive coping skills so they could manage their symptoms and get help if needed so that less kids commit suicide, use drugs, or harm themselves to cope or self medicate.
Our impact area is health and wellness. Through research, we have learned that there are many kids and adolescents who experience anxiety and depression. Many of these kids do not get treatment for these symptoms. We felt it was important to provide students with positive coping skills for them to rely on.
Our team wants to help our community help kids make better choices for which coping skills they use to manage their symptoms of anxiety and depression. We hope kids will use positive alternatives to cope and there will be a decrease in self harm (i.e. cutting) and use of marijuana. We want to help raise mental health awareness of students, and teach them about its harmful effects on emotional health and academic success. About 80% of adolescents who have anxiety do not get treatment (Service Utilization for Lifetime Mental Disorders in U.S. Adolescents: Results of the National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). Research also shows that 60% of adolescents who have depression do not get treatment (Bittner, A., Goodwin, R. D., Wittchen, H. U., Beesdo, K., Höfler, M., & Lieb, R. (2004).
When doing our research, we noticed that there are not many recent articles on children and adolescents experiencing anxiety and depression. There are even less on the topic of why it is important to speak about it. We found that surprising since gun violence in schools has been so prevalent over the last 10 years and mental health being the common denominator. This is why we felt it was even more important to speak to students and their teachers about these symptoms. We hope that students will feel empowered to let an adult know when they are feeling sad or anxious. We also hope that teachers can remember this information and begin to look at their students as emotional human beings and not just behaviors in the classroom. We hope that students can take away these coping skills and use them on their own before the symptoms become unmanageable.
Our team felt that the this was a very important topic and it was important that younger students knew about this while they are still making a foundation for themselves and are open to trying new things. We visited seven elementary schools and presented to our sixth grade class and encouraged students to practice the coping skills that they learned and to share it with others. We researched statistics and long term effects of depression and anxiety and decided the elementary students would be more open to try our ideas. We want to normalize emotions and take away the stigma that something is wrong if they feel sad or anxious. We wanted to normalize symptoms of anxiety and depression and show kids that they are not alone. Our goal was to provide students with positive coping skills so they could manage their symptoms and get help if needed so that less kids commit suicide, use drugs, or harm themselves to cope or self medicate.