I will always advocate for mental health and mental illness when it comes to young kids. Growing up I never had the vocabulary for it. I didn’t know how to express myself so I got lost in bad depression and I ended up self-harming because I did not know how to cope or speak up.

My middle school didn’t talk about it and high school didn’t either. You’d think being in a medical magnet program they would touch on mental illness in some form, but they didn’t.

I used to tell my parents there was something wrong with my brain, but couldn’t define it. I just knew something was off. And if a kid can’t find the words, how do they expect to get the help they need?

Adults need to guide them whether it’s in school or at home so that they don’t fall through those cracks. Kids/teens/young adults, have a high rate of suicide. I’m lucky mine never reached that far, but sometimes I believe it could have. It had to take my self-harm progressing into something more dangerous for me to seek help.

A kid should not have to reach rock bottom or even further to get the help they need.

I plan to become a teacher and I would like to think these are topics I could cover in my classroom (if allowed. Texas has so many strict rules in the school districts and the state now so it’s hard to know what’s allowed to be taught.)

And that’s another issue, you don’t have the government helping with these types of issues. They won’t provide school counselors, or the right training to spot kids who suffer from their mental health/mental illnesses. Parents and teachers are left to their own devices and unfortunately, there are those parents who may not care or may not know how to talk to their kids about these sorts of things.

I’m not sure what could be done, but I imagine there is something out there, some kind of solution.