By Sara Buckley Editor In Chief
Senior Yana Patel is tackling mental health in a new way at Holliston High School through her Service Learning Project, which is designed to engage students in conversations.
“My service project is focusing mainly on mental health and how it’s handled at HHS since I know that a lot of students don’t find it the best,” said Patel. Her main goal is to have “mental health … be spoken about more casually in the school.”
So far, she has sent out a survey to the grade-wide Google Classrooms to gather student feedback on their experience with how mental health has been handled at HHS. Patel has also created a visual novel through a video to accompany her project.
In addition, she has hosted student-led discussions with adjustment counselor Mrs. Erika Calais during DSB in Ms. Shawna Frost’s room. The main topics of conversation include the quality of mental health education at HHS and improvements to existing resources and information.
Mrs. Calais explained her role in an email interview, saying that she attended all of the discussions, offered information on school counseling resources, and provided advice on how to include more students in broader conversations about mental health.
Since these group discussions, Mrs. Calais has “seen a number of students engaged in these conversations, and it has given … school counselors,… perspective and ideas to keep in mind as we work towards helping all students find connections and destigmatize mental health issues at HHS.”
The final part of her project will include advertisements about the mental health resources provided by the school.
“Many people don’t know about [these mental health resources] like the adjustment counselors and the mental health resources section of the school counseling page,” said Patel. She cited this as one of the main reasons for tackling this problem.
Personal experiences partly inspire this project. “Mental health has been kind of a problem for me in the past,” explained Patel. “I kind of had to deal with it on my own because I wasn’t aware of the mental health resources that the school provides.“
The school has tried to address mental health challenges through a Teen Truth presentation led by Caleb Campbell in 2022. However, “a lot of people who I asked who were also present for Teen Truth completely forgot about the presentations, which I think just speaks to how generic it was and how…it didn’t really have much of an impact,” said Patel.
The school counseling department is another challenge Patel is tackling through this project. She explained that “a lot of people don’t want to reach out to their counselors because they don’t feel like they will be taken seriously or they don’t feel like it’s a safe space.”
As a result, Patel has chosen to host student-led discussions because she believes that talking about mental health in casual settings with peers is key to lessening the stigma.
“I want to also include the fact [that] your counselor doesn’t have to be the only safe space. You can talk to other students,” said Patel. “I want there to be safe spaces where groups can talk about what they feel they need,” she added.
Overall, Patel just wants “to make that more well known so students are able to access them if they need them.”
The Panther Press 