Wanting to bring leaders from various mental health clubs together, junior Venu Dhanabal worked with administrators and Conestoga’s mental health specialists to form a committee to remove the stigma around mental health at Conestoga.
The committee is composed of members of various mental health-focused clubs including Hope and Beyond, Student Aid for Mental Health, Morgan’s Message and the Conestoga Anti-Stress Alliance, works to discuss the mental health environment at Conestoga.
The group meets every month in English teacher Karen Gately’s room, where club presidents and a member from each affiliated club come together to discuss initiatives and ideas to implement. As president of Hope and Beyond, Dhanabal helped start the group earlier this year and finds it more effective to work together.
“I really started this (committee) because there were (four) different clubs all doing the same thing,” Dhanabal said. “You can just get so much more done if you’re together than if you are separated.”
Dhanabal and other Hope and Beyond members worked with the mental health specialists to kickstart the initiative in the fall. Senior Lexi Patterson, the president of Morgan’s Message, a group focused on eliminating the mental health stigma for athletes, joined the committee and values the additional opportunities it has provided.
“The mental health specialists and my adviser, Mrs. Gately, have been working together to create this committee because I know the mental health specialists have been talking about doing this for a couple years,” Patterson said. “It (Hope and Beyond) connected the mental health specialists with Mrs. Gately, and then I was able to be a part of the committee.”
With members across a range of different mental health clubs, meetings consist of discussions and planning for initiatives related to schoolwide mental health. Members of the committee hope to bring their own experiences from their clubs to these discussions at the monthly committee meetings.
“At a typical meeting, we talk about ways that we can spread awareness across the entire school. So we’ve been working on Take Care Tuesday and being a part of that,” Patterson said. “We were also talking about Mini-THON and just different ways that we can promote (mental health).”
In the future, Dhanabal and other mental health club leaders look to expand the committee’s outreach and continue working on new initiatives across the school. Dhanabal appreciates the added perspective that working with the committee has given him and the collaborative environment it promotes.
“My favorite part is the meetings where we just get together and we just talk for 30 minutes about initiatives we can do. It’s really interactive,” Dhanabal said. “Surrounding yourself with ambitious people is inspiring, and that’s what I feel whenever I go to these committee meetings.”
Rowan Chetty can be reached at [email protected].
