The Nurturer of my life by Gabriela

The Nurturer of my life by Gabriela - October 2019 Scholarship Essay

As a kid, you don’t understand how nurturing the mind of a child is the foundation for facilitating emotional interactions, building relationships and most importantly coping with traumatic experiences. At eight years old, my mother, the nurturer of my life, passed away. I watched her face death. Pain. The reality of experiencing breast cancer. With no happy ending. Having to deal with emotional trauma independently, I realized that the lack of support for mental health is a consequence of the machismo rooted in my culture.
After my mother’s passing, home was a place where the deepests silences felt like the loudest cries for help. I felt the need to understand why everyone was so hesitant to talk, and why everyone felt the need to dissociate from the situation. In an effort to understand why, I needed to understand my family’s central values and experiences in a broader setting. While in Puente, I was given the opportunity to question and challenge the values of my latinX culture, only to discover how mental illnesses are treated as taboo. I became intrigued by the connections between these concepts and the reality of my community. The absence of resources and will to understand these disorders within my community ignited my interest in psychology. My desire to confront these issues was truly magnified after taking a sociology college level course over the summer, that introduced me to how socialization and culture can affect an individual’s personality, mentality, and behavior as we learn to adapt to social norms that establish standards to what behavior is acceptable or not, creating many possibilities where social anxiety can develop.
I was exposed to the intersection of sociology and psychology when I was assigned to a Youth-led Participatory Action Research project that focuses on targeting community problems by using systematic research in order to develop a solution to the conflict. I realized that I knew many of my peers suffered from some type of mental illnesses but weren't many resources located near the community. Thus, I concluded that I would research on the different factors that influence the lack of mental health resources in our low-income community. Soon I developed research questions that involved whether different aspects like: culture, gender norms, age, education, and money, reflect the lack of attention to mental health. In order to clarify my questions, I surveyed 53 people asking them both about their background and their opinions towards the necessity for mental health resources. Seven participants that were classified as part of an older generation, believed mental health resources should be accessible because it's important. After evaluating their reactions towards mental health, I observed that although they believe these resources are important, the lack of education in the lower grade school division did not provide mental health awareness. Neutral responses came from those of an older generation, claiming that they felt understanding but could not truly be sympathetic, holding on to cultural rooted stigmas. Those that felt positive towards people with mental illnesses seemed to be of a younger generation that were motivated towards advocating mental health.
Overall, despite the differences in opinions amongst different age groups within the Eastern Coachella valley there is a consensus that people who need help do not have a lot of accessible resources. With this project I was able to advocate more mental health awareness to the community by presenting the findings to the school board, parents, and students, influencing them to spread awareness. My admiration for psychology has taken me along a path where I accomplished my academic goals like having the courage to take multiple AP/Honors classes and overcome my personal fight by understanding myself more in depth with the curriculum I learned. Even though my mother might not be in this world anymore, she has taken on a stance in my life where she inspires me to make her proud with what I have accomplished. Although her death was a traumatic experience, I was able to take the good out of it and be introduced to psychology. Today I aspire to give back to individuals struggling against mental illness that don’t have the same acceptance nor resources in order to give them a better quality of life.