When I was a kid,
my mom and I made this deal.
I was allowed to take three mental health rest days every semester
as long as I continued to do well in school.
This was because I started my mental health journey
when I was only six years old.
I was always what my grade-school teachers would call "a worrier,"
but later on we found out that I have trauma-induced anxiety
and clinical depression.
This made growing up pretty hard.
I was worried about a lot of things that other kids weren't
and school got really overwhelming sometimes.
This resulted in a lot of breakdowns,
panic attacks --
sometimes I was super productive
and other days I couldn't get anything done.
This was all happening during a time
when mental health wasn't being talked about
as much as it is now.
Especially youth mental health.
Some semesters I used all of those rest days to the fullest.
Others, I didn't need any at all.
But the fact that they were always an option
is what kept me a happy, healthy and successful student.
Now I'm using those skills that I learned as a kid
to help other students with mental health challenges.
I'm here today to offer you some insight into the world of teenage mental health:
what's going on,
how did we get here
and what can we do?
But first you need to understand
that while not everyone has a diagnoses mental illness like I do,
absolutely everyone --
all of you have mental health.
All of us have a brain that needs to be cared for
in similar ways that we care for our physical well-being.
Our head and our body are connected by much more than just our neck afterall.
Mental illness even manifests itself in some physical ways
such as nausea, headaches, fatigue and shortness of breath.
So since mental health effects all of us,
should we be coming up with solutions that are accessible to all of us?
That brings me to my second part of my story.
When I was in high school
I had gotten pretty good at managing my own mental health.
I was a successful student
and I was president of the organized association of student councils.
But it was around this time that I began to realize
mental health is much a bigger problem than just for me personally.
Unfortunately, my hometown was touched by multiple suicides
during my first year in high school.
I saw tose tragedies shake our entire community,
and as the president of a state-wide group,
I began hearing more and more stories
from students where this had also happened in their town.
So in 2018 at our annual summer camp,
we held a forum with about 100 high school students
to discuss teenage mental health.