Reflecting on my senior year, I am truly glad that I continued working with the Signature programs this year. Not only am I grateful to have had the chance to teach some of the community about mental wellness, but I also feel better equipped to bring the practices I learned about with me to college.
This ties in to what I feel has been my biggest success: my own education. I touched upon this in my Signature presentation, but studying mental wellness was quite different than my previous work in mental illness stigma and mental health education. I was able to develop a better understanding of the value of maintaining one’s holistic mental wellness, much like we improve our physical health. The biggest surprise for me was probably how incredible the scientific evidence is that backs up the value of mental wellness practices. Some of the neuroscience findings relating to increased gray matter in meditators, decreased cortisol levels in people who spend time with animals, and the interplay between stress and sleep neurotransmitters, truly gave me an incredible appreciation for the practices I studied. The two main challenges I faced were finding the initial topic of my project, and then encouraging people to attend the seminars. I will say I never received the attendance I wanted at the seminars, but even low attendance confirmed my thesis that people don’t treat their mental wellness with enough respect. I am so excited to bring everything I learned in the Signature program over these past two years to college with me. I am certain that my work with Signature has influenced my college path, as I plan on attending Washington University in St. Louis and studying Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology and Anthropology with a Global Health focus. Additionally, I received a full-tuition merit scholarship at WashU (and I wrote an essay about psychiatric treatment in the application for the scholarship). I am so thankful for the help of Ms. Moore, my mentor, for her wisdom and time, and Evangeline, for her guidance and sharing of the READY Center. I am also so grateful for the whole Signature team for providing me and other Emma girls with the opportunity to dive deep in to projects that excite us.
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(this is the blog post for April)
As my Signature project has come to an end, I was able to bring three different workshops to the Emma community. First we ran the Mediation and Mental Wellness event. I created a PowerPoint detailing a brief history of meditation, and showed a video about the scientific benefits of practicing meditation. Additionally, Ms. Bendall ran a guided meditation. At the end of the event I distributed handouts to the participants that listed recommendations for Youtube videos and books about meditation. The next event I ran was a Pets and Mental Wellness seminar in the READY Center with the help of Rosemarie and Treena. Rosemarie presented some of the benefits of spending time with animals on people’s mental wellness. I then showed the participants videos relating the different applications of therapy animals, ranging from mental health clinics to schools. I also had people rate their stress levels before and after spending time with Treena, and on a 1-10 scale, participants decreased on average 1.6 stress points. The last seminar we ran was Sleep and Mental Wellness, where Ndidi presented her work studying stress, sleep, and mental health. Her survey results for the Emma Willard community were extremely interesting. Also, the scientific relationship she researched relating to increased stress levels and decreased sleep quality were extremely pertinent to the community. I then distributed handouts to the participants about the benefits of sleep on mental wellness, tips for sleeping better, and the recommended amount of sleep for different age groups. Overall I was pleased with how each of these events went, and was happy to share this information with the community! |
Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all. -Bill Clinton
Katherine WallaceEmma Willard Class of 2017. Archives
May 2017
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