Legends Can Achieve – Portlaoise College

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

Mental health is a huge problem especially since Covid 19 happened. There are loads of people in schools that are masking their anxiety/depression. As a group we discussed this and realized that people are scared to admit there's a problem. And so our postbox idea was born.

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

From our researched we discovered that there is a huge problem when it comes to mental health and young people. It's something that although is discussed on the news it's not fixed. An outlet for this is needed outside talking to a counselor because sometimes young people don't have the time or money and talking to their parents might not be an option. We also learned about GDPR.

What have you learnt about your Hero?

Our Hero is Spiderella. We came up with this as we were talking about super heroes as a joke and realized that a spider has 8 legs which represents each subject we need to study in mainstream education. After talking as a group we all realised that a lot of us didn't want to feel the pressure we did at Junior Cert for some it caused severe mental health issues because there was no life balance. Our hero learned not to be ashamed of asking for help and that sometimes wearing a different suit makes us braver.

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

Apart from giving them stronger legs to hold the weight of life we would make sure that the hero knows how to process feelings and emotions. This would be a foundation for the hero never have to feel an emotion that they are ashamed of discussing to get another perspective because 'a problem shared is a problem halved.'

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

Our mental health postbox. This allows people top share their feelings ANONYMOUSLY with a trained professional to get an opinion on how to move forward. If the answer is posted on a notice board for everyone to read it will reach more people and maybe others will realize that we all have similar problems even though we don't talk about them.

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

We have no questions at the moment as we are still developing our idea.