Due to all the crap that’s happened with myself and a bunch of friends, a close friend and I are starting a club at my school that will do things like give presentations about mental and physical health problems that affect teens and form a teen health center. This is all a huge undertaking, but we feel that we should do it because of what we’ve been through and the school’s lack of resources in dealing with situations like major mental health problems and education of students about health issues that we all need to know about. We want to do it, but I’m not sure that it’ll stay established after we graduate. Hopefully what we do over the next year will make a difference, but if it doesn’t, I’ll be satisfied with the effort I put forth to let people know that everyone has problems and that people should talk about them and get help. I’m also working on a webpage that has information and a place to either post questions or email questions to me about mental health problems and sex questions… I get enough of both to realize that people my age are seriously lacking in information about both.
I was just wondering what my fellow dopers think about what I’m doing, so I’m hoping I get some thoughts and possibly some advice on this. Thanks for listening guys.
Seriously, though, good for you! I completely agree that most teens don’t know much about mental health issues or sexuality and this often does cause problems. (I recently graduated from a very small, very intense private highschool, and I just found out that they’re now offering psychiatric counseling to their students. This is a school that had a dropout rate of approximately 20% when I was there.)