Teens In Isolation:The Solution

In my blog post I explained my project which was, helping teens and their mental health during the pandemic. My idea for my agent of change was to make a discord server to help and communicate with other teens who were affected by the pandemic. In my discord server there are multiple different eras and bots made to make different people comfortable, for example if you like k-pop there is a k-pop section with different text and voice channels. The bots in the server are for comfort purposes with virtual hugs, kisses, and pats. Now that everything is set up my goal is to get more people on the server if they’re interested.

@realdepressionproject has an instagram full of resources and advice on how to deal with what you’re going through, and for people who aren’t familiar with mental illness they have posts to help you better understand people with mental illness. They have posts like “what does depression feel like” and “15 ways to reach out without saying ‘how are you’” so you can assist and help your friends get through this time. There are a lot of ways to make a change and I think the “real depression project” is a great way for teens who feel isolated to get help.

The real depression project was part of what I wanted to do for this project. For me it was really difficult for me to choose what I wanted to do because I felt like you couldn’t do much with my topic. Choosing my ‘Agent of change’ was chaotic, I did make an instagram page for my project but I didn’t feel like anyone considered it a safe space and I didn’t know how to make it a safe space. I wanted it to be more private, and even though discord is a public app I wanted people to feel like they wouldn’t be easily judged.

In the process of my ‘Agent of change’ I had many different topics and I was struggling to find a topic that really affected me and my peers, until I realized we were in a pandemic. I think teens’ mental health has been going under the rug for a really long time and even now, I had a hard time finding resources about it. Out of all of the topics I had I’m glad I chose this one because it really represents what a lot out of teens are going through right now.

Now that this project is coming to an end I feel like this project was perfect for the class of 2024. This project gives us time to reflect and think about what’s going on in our world, I feel like this project made us look at the world and actually do something. I enjoyed doing this project and I think the 9th graders next year will too.

Since doing this project I learned the importance of mental health and communication, there were things I learnt about myself, like coding and organizing certain things like the bots and sections. It was really hard for me to set this up so I watched tutorials on youtube and that helped. I feel like there are things that I could’ve done better because I’ve never done this before. I could’ve gotten the server more organized with the channels and I got caught up with the commands for some bots so that could’ve been improved as well, luckily that’s an easy fix.

There is still more work that needs to be done, obviously me making a discord is not going to solve this problem. However I think the real work needs to be education and better understanding of what you or another person might be going through, because yes the pandemic made it worse but it’s not going to go away. I think a real solution would be to continue having these conversations with my discord and instagram accounts like @realdepressionproject