Erasing the Stigma on Mental Health by Samantha

Erasing the Stigma on Mental Health by Samantha - July 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I were given the opportunity to share my thoughts in the form of a TED Talk, I would make my talk about erasing the stigma surrounding mental health. Being someone who has personally gone through this, I feel it is incredibly important to talk about something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Someone has to say it, so why not me?

My talk would begin with a short anecdote about my life regarding my mental health (or lack thereof). It’s an easy, effective way to draw the audience in, thus ensuring that they will be engaged from the start. Plus, it makes myself—the speaker—seem more relatable, as I can guarantee that there has got to be at least one person in the audience who can relate to me. Following my short personal story, I would transition into statistics about mental health and mental illness, because to me, those two are closely related. For example, many people probably don’t know that 1 in 5 Americans have a mental illness in their life. If individuals are not educated on something that affects 20% of this nation’s population, then who will understand the side of those affected by mental health issues? Using that transition—I would then delve into how education, especially at a young age, is vital for this country in erasing the stigma around mental health. The earlier we are exposed to this concept of mental health, the more we normalize it in our own lives, and hopefully by doing so, take accountability for our own health and realize that sometimes it’s okay not to be okay. Oftentimes in today’s world, individuals brush the concept of mental health under the rug and dismiss it as not being real. That is why it is imperative for me to be speaking about mental health in the first place—it’s real, and it’s happening, so why ignore it? Lastly, I would close off my talk by bringing my speech back full circle and emphasizing that my mental health matters; your mental health matters; his mental health matters—everyone’s mental health matters. So let’s do our part in raising awareness of that. Let’s be the generation that erases this stigma.