When Brighton High School junior Lauren Johnston decided to join Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD), it wasn’t just to add another extracurricular to her resume. She genuinely wanted to spread awareness about students’ wellbeing and mental health.
“I wanted to be part of a community where I can uplift and help others,” Johnston said, adding that she wants to “help make a difference.”
This is what Yellow Ribbon Week, an annual event at BHS devoted to spreading mental health awareness and suicide prevention, ultimately hopes to accomplish. From October 21 to October 25, staff and students worked together to help address the stigma around mental health and encourage students to seek help if they need it. This year’s theme, “Find Your Anchor,” urged students to recognize something—whether it’s a person or an object—that helps them feel safe and secure in tough times.
Throughout the week, Johnston helped man a booth run by SADD that distributed “little trinkets to let people know that they are loved and that people care about them.” The Carl Nagy Foundation, a local organization that addresses mental health and suicide prevention, joined in by passing out goodies and resources during lunch. In line with the theme, students were also encouraged to find their own individualized paper anchors taped to the courtyard windows.
Though Yellow Ribbon Week doesn’t draw the same attention that other school events, such as Pink Week and Senior Survivor, engender, BHS social worker Kris Nelson said that this is largely intentional.
“We’re sensitive that it doesn’t come off like we’re having a pep rally,” Nelson said. “We put up stuff, but we just want to be sensitive to what people feel about it.”
The main event was an assembly on Wednesday, where freshmen gathered to hear from Nelson, the school’s counselors, and numerous students who shared about the importance of mental health awareness and their own experience with mental health.
According to Nelson, Yellow Ribbon Week has been a tradition at BHS for over twenty years. It was originally proposed by a group of students after one of their classmates took his own life, and since then, the event has continued to provide support and a sense of community to students.
“It’s kind of evolved a little bit in ways, but it’s still the same basic message that we need to talk about mental health [and] suicide prevention. We’re not afraid to here at Brighton High School, which I’m proud of,” Nelson said. “It’s a tough subject, and people—we don’t know their stories. A lot of students tell their stories, but this is a way for us to really think about it and see how we can help each other.”
Not only does this open dialogue help erode the stigma surrounding mental health, but Nelson said that it also encourages students to reach out.
“What we often talk about a lot is, why do the students not ask us for help?” she said. “A lot do, don’t get me wrong, but I think there’s a lot out there that don’t know how to ask, so we always try to really stress the point that it’s okay to ask for help.”
Help is accessible in many places, including many online resources, like mental health and suicide hotlines. Alongside these tools, Nelson hopes that students recognize the fact that the people and resources at school can also serve as an “anchor.”
“A good place to always start is in the counseling office. We have the counselors, we have social workers, we have a wellness zen space that people can just [go to] if they need a little bit of time to regroup. We have a new mental health support person this year,” Nelson said. “You know, it’s okay to ask an adult for help…Administrators, counselors, teachers—we really send a message that we’re here to support you.”
Although Nelson acknowledges that there are areas where BHS is still striving to improve its resources and support, she is happy that the school addresses mental health and suicide in the first place.
“Some schools don’t do anything around suicide prevention,” Nelson said. “We do, and I’m very proud of that fact, and it means a lot that we take it serious here.”
