Mental health, happiness and a cherry on top!

If there’s one thing humanity has taught us all, it is that when you wish to remain happy, you have made the best decision in your life. It’s strange to think that why a mere emotion should be of such importance to us.

However, when it comes to talking about mental health, we all start looking at our watches. We never considered mental health to be important, and it shows. There came a need for a group of teenagers and their counsellor to team up together and decide for once that we must use our voices to make a difference no matter how small it may be.

Being a student of a Sharjah-based school, and a proud member of the Health and Mind Club in our school, it never struck that we had come a very long way from what we began as. We were one of the first Indian schools to have a club dedicated to mental health. Originally a group of 20 members, small goals, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t dream big!

We marked the first week of October on our calendars as Mental Health Awareness Week in our school. From teachers to students, and all the way to the support staff, our Mental Health Week was a blast! Concerts, classroom talks, assemblies, movies, and street plays were just the crust of the bread! But soon enough we decided to expand our horizons and take a larger leap.

A pamphlet on our door saying that a

Dubai-based university was hosting the first mental health summit. We knew that it’s a big opportunity and we had to participate.

As unexpected as every story takes a turn, ours took one, too. We won the prize of second runners-up, out of 18 schools that took part. Having received this trophy, we all said one thing to ourselves, that though this award is the outcome of our teamwork and spirit, it is also to all those who decide to break the stigma of mental health and to those who rose from the ashes to fight their mental illnesses.

■ The reader is a student at a Sharjah-based school.