<p>Here at peers.net, we work with a group of young people who are committed to fighting the stigma around mental health. We call them the Peer Advisory Committee- or the PAC! Our PAC helps us out with big and small projects happening in the company, and we trust them to give their opinions and feedback so we can all make mental health care more accessible. This month, we asked them if they had a mental health hot take, and these were their responses!&nbsp;</p><h2><strong>Sam:</strong></h2><p>During my educational journey, I have become acutely aware of the critical role mental health plays within the criminal justice system. By observing the high prevalence of mental health issues among incarcerated individuals, It became clear that many who end up in jail are grappling with severe psychological challenges, often stemming from traumatic life experiences.</p><p>This realization has fundamentally shaped my perspective on crime and its root causes. I believe that criminal behavior can often be traced back to underlying mental health issues—not in the literal sense that all criminal acts are committed due to a diagnosable mental disorder, but in the broader sense that personal trauma and psychological distress can lead individuals down a path of criminality or poor decisions. By understanding and addressing these root causes, we can develop more effective interventions that prevent crime by offering the support individuals need.</p><p>I aim to contribute to a shift in the criminal justice system towards a more rehabilitative and individualized approach, recognizing that each person’s hardships and psychological makeup are unique. On a personal level, Managing the stress and workload requires a strong mental health plan. For me, this includes regular physical exercise, gaming, and training in martial arts!</p><h2><strong>Sophia:</strong></h2><p>I will never forget my first anxiety attack. I was 15, a freshman in high school and I had gotten into a fight with my best friend. I walked past her in the hallway at school the day after the fight and suddenly felt like I was under water; I couldn’t breathe and time seemed to come to a near stop. I sat on the floor of the library between the bookshelves until I could calm my hands down enough to text my mom. She told me to go see the counselor, whose office I then sat in for what felt like forever, trying to explain what I was feeling. She kindly suggested that I was experiencing an anxiety attack and in a tone that made me feel like she truly cared, she promised to keep checking in with me before sending me back to class. I never heard from her again.&nbsp;</p><p>I had been experiencing some mental health challenges that I was struggling to navigate, and the fight with my friend was all because her response was: “just go see a therapist, it’s not that hard.” I know she was trying to be supportive, but my mental health hot take is that it IS that hard. It was hard for me because I took that big scary first step and tried to get help from an adult who I was supposed to be able to trust. That adult didn’t show up for me as I needed her to, so taking any further steps towards healing was absolutely hard for me. I felt like I had finally been brave enough to ask for help and I was ignored. And there are tons of other reasons why it can be hard – therapy is expensive, many people don’t have support from their friends or family to seek therapy, etc. So my second hot take is that therapy is not the only solution. There are a million ways to get help, the hardest part is being resilient enough to find what works for you.</p><h2><strong>Julia:</strong></h2><p>I volunteered with my university’s peer support service throughout undergrad and in my fourth year, I was a team leader and helped train and supervise a group of peer supporters. During our last meeting, my group came to the realization that the lessons we learned as peer supporters can be used by anyone and everyone who wants to better support the people in their lives. These were the tips we came up with:</p><ol><li>Actually listen! Focus on listening rather than crafting a response or jumping to a solution and don’t underestimate the power of validating the experiences of the person you’re supporting. </li><li>Prioritize the needs of the person you’re supporting. For example, it can be helpful to ask whether they are looking for emotional support, advice/solutions, or both. Focus on their situation, and try not to centre the conversation around your experiences.</li><li>Remember that the person you’re supporting is the expert of their own experiences, and knows their situation the best!</li></ol><h2><strong>Jorge:</strong></h2><p>How do we change the current course of the youth mental health crisis?” Over the last 3 years, I have consistently heard this question be asked in more spaces than I can keep track of. It’s a valid question to be asked, too, given the current state of youth mental health in the United States. When folks ask this, they often expect an answer, which I would consider cliche at this point. For instance: – Increase the mental health workforce &amp; make it more representative of the folks being served – Make access to services more readily and easily available (aka affordable, in most cases) – And the like… However, not only is there no one size fits all solution.</p><p>I think the best “solve” to the youth mental health crisis are multiple solutions that come from beyond the mental health space. Instead, I think it is important we acknowledge the intersectionality of mental health and recognize that to improve the state of youth mental health we must find solutions for climate change, poverty, food and housing insecurity, gun violence, and so forth. Why? Well, because these are the many issues that Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been disproportionately exposed to compared to the generations that came before us. Likewise, these issues worry us day in and day out without any real solution on the horizon. So, I believe we will only truly begin to see significant change by addressing these other issues and their many intersections with mental health.</p><h2><strong>Dennis:</strong></h2><p>Self-care and mental health was something foreign to me. For years I navigated mental health challenges in silence. Growing up in a traditional Vietnamese American family part of the Asian Americans Diaspora, there wasn’t a word for it, and showing emotions was considered a weakness. Through most of my 20s, I silently suered and didn’t understand why I felt a certain way. In addition, navigating a nonparent disability at the time added an extra layer to everything I was feeling along with my undetected neurodivergence. From my survivalist way of living, I learned to push through with every milestone and took on whatever life threw at me until it was no longer sustainable.</p><p>It was only a few years ago when I became aware of my autism and my neurodivergence. That was when I started advocating and raising awareness for mental health. It was a light bulb moment that gave me clarity about who I was and who I am becoming. At that moment, I realized why I struggled for so long, that I no longer have to live this way, and I can start to get to know the real unmasked me. I learned to be my true authentic self and no longer wanted to masked anymore. That was something I didn’t know I was unconsciously doing. The importance of representation and seeing people like myself encouraged me to be proactive with my mental health and to tap into the power of storytelling and share my stories. It was then through this process that I realized I was not alone in my journey and that there are people out there who shared similar experiences as to mine.</p><p>Overall, the discovery and understanding of my neurodivergence have propelled me to become a prominent speaker and advocate for the AANHPI, disability, mental health, and neurodivergence community that I am today</p><h2><strong>Blake:</strong></h2><p>My hot take is that wilderness therapy can prove to be positive and healing, when the program focuses strongly on therapeutic support and community bonding. I attended a wilderness therapy program that shut down earlier this year due to stigma negatively impacting their sustainability as a program. They did a goodbye call for alumni who sought closure, and there were three pages of alumni filling the chat and conversations on how the program saved their life and helped them. This program focused strongly on the latest therapeutic interventions alongside living in the wilderness. I felt cared for in the program, was not abused by any means (staff members never put their hands on me without asking and saying why!) and despite me not wanting to be there, I learned tools and skills that I used to this day, 5-6 years later. At times, we had fun. We laughed. We cried. As a result, I am still in contact with other students on my team and some staff years later as well who all share the same experience.</p><h2><strong>Amna:</strong></h2><p>I have always loved doing “self-care” activities like putting on a face mask, exfoliating, doing my nails, and buying myself a new crop top. Self-care meant doing something extra for myself that day – treating myself. However, I found that these activities often left me feeling more tired than rejuvenated. If “self-care” is tiring, is it really self-care?</p><p>My hot take on self-care is that the current mainstream approach is often superficial and commercialized, focusing more on temporary fixes like spa days, retail therapy, and feel-good slogans rather than addressing the deeper, systemic issues that impact mental well-being. True self-care should be about creating <strong>sustainable </strong>habits, fostering genuine human <strong>connections</strong>, and <strong>advocating </strong>for societal changes that promote mental health for all. This means prioritizing things like adequate sleep, balanced nutrition, regular physical activity, and meaningful social interactions over quick, surface-level solutions.&nbsp;</p><h2><strong>Isaac:</strong></h2><p>One of the achievements I am most proud of is one you will not see listed on my resume: creating “The Garden”. I am not speaking about a conventional garden, but rather it is the name of the community I created during my time as an Undergraduate Student Mentor (or more informally called, “big”). The Garden is composed of my seven mentees (or my “beans” as I jokingly call them), and the mentees that they took on later in their college career.&nbsp;</p><p>During my time serving as a mentor, I had supported my mentees out of dissociative episodes; served as an unofficial crisis responder; and helped my mentees access formal counseling services. While this did not formally fall under my role as a mentor, it taught me firsthand, the power of centering lived experience in recovery. My university did not provide any training on how to handle such situations. However, I found that sharing my own lived experience navigating life with my mental health struggles, was absolutely instrumental in supporting others.&nbsp;</p><p>Higher education institutions are a critical point in the student mental health crisis. Leveraging pre-existing peer support networks, created for students by students, is the key to addressing critical gaps in mental healthcare we see today.&nbsp;</p><p>Our PAC has some amazing experiences working in the mental health space and we have a lot to learn from them! We can’t wait to see what they do this year.&nbsp;</p><p><br>&nbsp;</p>

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