How to Improve Wellness: Care More about Mental Health and Drug Abuse

A little over a week ago, I published an article talking about the issues with community wellness. It covers irrelevant topics, as well as being unconventional for us students when that time period could be used for something much more valuable. 

Community wellness lessons discuss subject matters that don’t really correlate with what teens like us see in our world. Instead of talking about the effects of bullying and how to “express your feelings,” lessons should include the problems concerning mental health and drug abuse. 

Mental health is one of the world’s and teens’ biggest problems. According to cdc.gov, mental health disorders that can severely affect a student’s learning, like ADHD and depression, appear in teens more so than young children. This being said, we should incorporate the education of mental health in community wellness lessons. It will help better the school environment and list resources to those impacted by a mental disorder or disorder. 

Drug abuse is also a huge dilemma for high school kids. On drugabuse.gov, it states that from 2017 to now, the drug use and abuse rate has gone up by over 10%. The drug abuse problem is serious, and it will get worse if we only take one day to learn about them and when we do, we view the same staged video from 3 prior years. 

The way the AACPS barely recognizes this along with the bumpy mental health roads shows how little the school system cares about these topics. I know as a student that the lack of information regarding these issues can make me feel that what I am going through mentally is not important, and I often feel belittled by the school board, especially in response to the mental health discussion in the October 29 press release. 

While the curriculum is nothing short of repetition, I appreciate the effort and message the Equity Committee wants to get across. Bullying is not okay, and it should be brought up. My one red flag is that bullying shouldn’t be the only thing brought up, and it should not shut out other discussions that are just as important.