Pick One: Grades or Mental Health
By Amelia McCord
The “self-care” and “peer monitoring” advice from EHS’s recent mental health meetings is great . . . if it was possible to actually achieve it while still living up to the high academic standards that EHS expects.
Teachers and staff alike frequently tell us that the first two weeks of the semester are most crucial to our grades. If that’s true, it’s certainly incongruent with being crammed into an auditorium and then a classroom with kids who barely know each other, to discuss self-care strategies that many of us can’t realistically achieve.
More than 4 months after September 10th, EHS announced two mental health meetings to receive student feedback. Well, here it is: the help being offered is a direct conflict with school. Take time for yourself? Great, do that. Then between honors classes and basketball, you’ll spend the next two weeks playing catch-up. Ask for extensions? Great, if I knew how to tell an adult I barely know that I’m “having a rough time” unlike the other students who are meeting their deadlines. As one student in a small-group meeting astutely noted: “If I was to take a mental health day, I’d still deal with the stress of lagging behind while everyone else goes on.”
Last week, we were shown graphs about the non-linear healing process. “It’s a wave, and you can ride it,” claims Lindsey Breslin, the Executive Director of Resilience 1220, visiting for the January 22nd meeting. But for many of us, bringing up past trauma isn’t making anyone feel better. The graphs remind us that we are dwarfed by our own healing and responsible for making the graph come true without knowing where to start. While we appreciate EHS making support available to those who need it, mandatory meetings like these are simply making many of us revisit what we have been trying to move past.
Many students opted out of January’s meetings as soon as they could. Upwards of 100 of those were crowding the library, creating a stressful, overstimulating, and frankly unproductive environment (even for those not phobic or allergic to the roaming therapy dogs).
The January 15th and 22nd sessions surely were planned with good intentions. But they should have been held in October. The behavioral changes that experts claim are so dangerous are our new normal now. We hardly remember what we had for breakfast- are we expected to retroactively psychoanalyze our peers’ behavior from three months ago? Irreversible damage has been done, and everyone is trying to heal in their own ways. At this point a one-size-fits-all mandatory assembly is only taking many of us away from a necessary return to academics and focusing on our future. Ms Breslin also notes that after a traumatic experience like the one we had, “your concentration in school goes offline.”
With all due respect to those who still want to help students in trauma, if EHS and community organizations would truly like to offer ongoing support, they should allow us the leniency to be able to take care of ourselves, even above academic demands.
Photo by Echo Robbins.