A Headstrong headstart
Mental health summit teaches students to ‘champion change’
Turning youth into “champions of change” is what the Headstrong Summit on mental health aims to do.
An annual event, it was held Tuesday at Cape Breton University and 80 students from across Cape Breton attended.
“I had actually never head about this until about a month ago when they asked me to be a part of it,” said Niall MacIntyre, a Grade 11 student at Dalbrae Academy in Mabou, “but the turnout that we have and the enthusiasm from the people who are here just makes me feel like we can definitely just completely destroy the stigma — at least here in Cape Breton.”
The one-day event is done as a partnership between the Nova Scotia Health Authority child and adolescent mental health and addiction services, the Cape Breton-Victoria Regional School Board and Family Services of Eastern Nova Scotia.
School administrators chose the students who participated in the event, which had workshops, speakers and a brainstorming session.
The idea is to make these students the “champions” of the cause. It is hoped they will bring the information back to their schools and create plans to create awareness campaigns about mental health and mental illness.
“I think this is one of the biggest ones we’ve had,” said Kaitlyn O’Neill, a Grade 11 student at Glace Bay High School who has participated in the summit for the past three years.
“The first one was just us and BEC (Breton Education Centre.) Then we brought it to the junior highs but this is the first one we did with the high schools and everyone is here. I think it’s really cool to see all the people.”
This year students from the Cape Breton-Victoria Regional School Board, Strait Regional School Board, Conseil scolaire acadien provincial, Munroe Academy and Alison Bernard Memorial High School took part in the event.
Since starting, the group in Glace Bay High School has grown from 10 students to an average of 50 who attend the monthly meetings. They’ve put on fundraisers for mental health organizations, awareness campaigns for mental health and mental illness, and held school assemblies.
“We did an assembly at the gym where Kylie Wadden spoke and I think it was the quietest assembly we ever had at school. Not a single person talked,” O’Neill said.
Wadden, a substance abuse disorder survivor, did a presentation at this year’s summit that moved many of the students.
“(She) was talking about the loss of her father and how it affected her. A few years ago I lost my grandmother and I never really knew anyone else who had lost someone close to them,” said Adrian Wells, a Grade 12 student at Sydney Academy.
“I felt very weird and I didn’t know if what I was experiencing was normal. But seeing her and how she struggled I realized how I was feeling and what I am feeling is completely normal.”
Another exercise that had an impact on some of the participants was about schizophrenia. Two students tried to have a conversation while other students were yelling things from a script in their ears.
“It really shows how hard it is to focus when there’s, like, voices in your head, and people are yelling at you but no one else knows what is going on,”
MacIntyre said.
Grace MacDonald, who is also in Grade 11 at Dalbrae, said she now understands how frustrating it would be.
“It makes me upset because I am so fortunate but people could be treating them badly and not have a clue how it feels,” said MacDonald.