The Official Newspaper of Ascend International School
Mental Health Day
Mental health day is one of those days which exists on calendars, but isn’t given any acknowledgement. Here at Ascend, that doesn’t happen. Planning a schedule for mental health day was left to the DP1 psychology students, as it apparently fit their qualifications. As a psych student, it did not seem very reassuring for this responsibility to fall on the shoulders of my classmates and I. Our main preparations started on September 29th, during which we created a theme, message, and decided our presentation format. We eventually settled upon the topic of bullying and decided to prepare a short skit for it. The script we prepared for the video seemed a bit generic in my opinion, however, there were not many other options which would have appealed to a varied audience.
12th grade students also contributed to the creation, editing and narration of the video. Shwetank Verma, a DP2 student, presented a speech in the video, and another student offered their skill in editing, which made the video more attractive, emotional and slightly humorous. On October 13th, the day of ‘celebration’, we were tasked with presenting the video to the 10th grade classroom. As the creators of the video, we accompanied each other at the back of the class as we watched the 10th graders' reaction.
The reception we received during and after the video was as expected. It may have been unfortunate that they were all laughing at the video much harder than we wanted, but we felt satisfied knowing that they had truly enjoyed the ‘show’. An anonymous student mentioned “It mixed humor with education, but I was laughing so hard I couldn't focus”. Some others did not focus much on the message and instead on its production. “It was disorganized because I felt like it was”, they said. However, some did focus on the more positive aspects of it. Madhav Somaiya, a student from the MYP 5 class left a cheerful comment saying, “It was a funny and informative video”. Pamphlets advertising the importance of mental health were in order as we distributed them amongst everyone. Ishita Ambekar, a psych student, talked about the event in general as well as her side of the production by saying, “It was a fun experience and it was a challenge to produce an appealing pamphlet”.
Overall, it would seem as though the day was a success, being organized by only a handful of students. By successfully entertaining an audience, having a fun time in the making and organizing such an event and being able to appreciate its outcome, we didn't seem to have much to complain about.
-Ishaan Rajan