Civic Engagement event addresses mental health: ‘a growing problem’

Avery Inman, Blue M Editor-in-Chief

If there’s one thing that many of us learned from the nationwide lockdown caused by COVID, it’s the importance of mental health. 

While dealing with the challenges that COVID brought upon us, keeping our mental health and mind surfaced as a widely talked about topic. Even now, three years post the beginning of the global pandemic, mental health is still something worth talking about. The Manhattan High’s Civic Engagement club took time out of their Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to hold a community conversation about mental illness in America. 

According to Civic Engagement members, a community conversation is one where participants are guided through a conversation by a facilitator.

“The purpose of the event was to hopefully have all the participants gain different viewpoints on relevant subjects,” sophomore Advith Natarajan said. “There were a variety of different options that students could or participants could discuss and there were things like administering certain resources or awareness about the issue of mental health. There were in total three approaches to the issue that were broken down into different actions with drawbacks that the participants discussed with their facilitator.”

This was the club’s third year of hosting a MLK Jr day event. The club chose the topic of mental illness as it is something that many students and teachers can relate to. The group broke into smaller groups to hold the discussions.

“We weren’t sure how the turnout would be just based on signups. We only had about 15, but we ended up having 25 people show up,” Natarajan said. “We had four discussion groups and everyone really enjoyed it. Based on our post survey, 100% of our participants said they would participate in a conversation again.”