Good mental health is important, no matter what age you are, and students at St. Pat’s High School got to see what nursing students at Aurora College have been working on to help in the area.
The school hosted a mental health wellness fair on Wednesday morning and featured nearly a dozen different presentations on such topics as peer pressure, anxiety, eating disorders, among others. It was designed to provide students with easy access to health information and resources for issues they might encounter during their teenage years.
“It’s kind of preemptive before they experience those struggles,” said Cindy Kimove, program support teacher at St. Pat’s. “If they have resources that can help them, they know where to turn as opposed to being alone or feeling alone in their struggles. It also de-stigmatizes it because there’s so many people around all talking about it in a normal way.”
Students spent most of the morning going around to the various projects and hear about the research, as well as see the results.
Jacqueline Stanbridge, who’s also a program support teacher at the school, emphasized the importance of mental health awareness.
“Making it really not something that has a negative connotation, but rather something that we should all be talking about because everybody needs extra care, extra wellness, and extra love,” she said.
Kimove also said that the event included a scavenger hunt activity, where students visited each booth and answered questions on a sheet provided.
Sean Smith, a third-year nursing student from Aurora College, was one of the presenters at the event. His topic covered relations between mental health and vaping.
“Vaping has kind of snowballed from a smoking cessation aid to its own thing,” he said. “It has its rightful places, like something to help you stop putting something in your mouth like a cigarette, which is objectively worse, but especially for these younger people and their developing minds. It affects their concentration and anxiety levels as well.”
As the school heads into exam season, the timing of the event was particularly relevant, said Kimove.
She said that many students put pressure on themselves to achieve high grades, which can lead to distress and anxiety.
“The event aimed to provide students with simple, practical strategies to help them manage these feeling and study more effectively,” she said.