JALL – Newtown School

Why as a team did you choose to focus on this challenge?

We chose mental health because before you can help other people, you have to have a somewhat good mental health. Before you do any other challenge like for example, helping other people, or a group of people, you wont be able to fix or overcome any challenge if you don’t have a stable mental health. For that reason we choosed mental health because we want to learn how to help people if they are in that situation and we can now what we have to do and say, who do we have to ask for help and all of it.

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What do you know now about the challenge that you didn't know before?

It is a lot more common now after covid with all the lockdowns people went through alone, then it was before covid. Its more of a serious matter now and you have to be careful and conscious about what you say and how you say something to other people. We also learned that there's a lot of people with mental health problems and we didn't noticed, and now after researching about the problem we can say that we have to beware because maybe you know someone with mental health problems and maybe they need your help and you don't know.

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What have you learnt about your Hero?

Xini was a nice and reliable person. But, lately after covid she’s been struggling and having a hard time with everything. Lashing out at people that don’t deserve to be, not on top of her school work like she used to be and less active than she was before. We learnt that she needs help. I think that Xini is a good example of what's mental health means and what we should do for helping her, we learned that even if you have bad days you can move on if you try all your best, and that;s what Xini did.

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If you could improve one thing for your Hero what would that be?

Xini has food problems and addiction problems, the both of them are very serious and we have to do all the things that we can for helping her, we are not experts but we can try to talk with her and help her, first we should try that all her family and friends are with her, they help her in everything and she has to know that there is people that love her and care about her, that's the first thing she has to know that she has a lot of people that she can talk if she want to.

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Do you have any ideas for a potential solution? No matter how raw, share them with your Mentors for feedback.

We would talk with Xini, and we would ask her about how is she feeling, how is her relationship with her familiy, her friends, in the school, with herself. Later after talking about her life, we could start taking about how she wants to feel, what she wants to do for helping her to move on, and then we could start thinking about how we can help her, maybe talking to some expert because that always helps, maybe talking with her family because maybe she feels more comfortable with them, our maybe with her friends, but she has to talk.

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Ask your Mentor anything …. This is a chance to ask your Mentors a direct question relating to your Big Idea.

We have two questions. How do we know if someone has mental health problems? How we can help them?