Byerly 1

Ashley Byerly

Professor Debra Jizi

UWRT 1103-012

20 March 2018

What are better ways to protect teenagers’ and young adults’ mental health in school systems?

My specific purpose for this project is to gain some knowledge about the mental health

care system in general. This information could give me some insight on how students could

possibly avoid going down the rabbit holes known as depression and anxiety. If I found

anything useful, I might could inform my close friends that I know struggle with these two

mental health issues. The main reason I chose this inquiry question is because of the recent

suicide attempt a close friend from middle school just had on March 9th. It was the last day of

spring break before I left to go back to Charlotte and I got a text saying he tried to down a bunch

of pills as well as cut his wrists. He was luckily stopped by the friend he had over at the time, so

he is fine physically, but he is in a bad place mentally at the time. It’s going to be a long road to

recovery, but if I learned about mental health issues in general and the resources available,

maybe I could help him as well as the friend who had to go through the experience of stopping

him from committing suicide. All of this reflects my character strengths of perspective wisdom

and perseverance. The reason for this is because my experiences have given me wisdom and

taught me to persevere through anything thrown my way the best I could.

I do have a bias on this topic because of the home town I grew up in. The town I grew up

in is called Randleman, just a small country town that did not have very many resources in any

of its schools, especially the high school. The counseling program was useless and there were
 Byerly 2

several students who I knew personally dealt with mental health problems because of things

related to school. The amount of stress one is under when their school has barely any academic

programs that are useful when applying to college is ridiculous. I know that from a personal

standpoint and during my senior year, I told my best friend of 14 years that I was going to

commit suicide due to all of the home stress piled up on top of the academic stress toward the

end of 12th grade. This bias comes into play because to me, schools do not have a counseling

program even worth considering when it comes to mental health and that has caused a lot of

frustration throughout my years of public school.

Peer feedback:

Maybe add another character strength