I'm raising 1000 dollars for youth mental health
The money goes to 20Talk, a mental health charity that helps young people deal with and understand mental health issues before they get bad.
Their focus is prevention - giving people the tools to look after their mental wellbeing before reaching crisis point.
The main way they do that is Mental Health Maintenance (MHM), a free one-day workshop designed to help people understand the different areas of their wellbeing (sleep, nutrition, money, relationships and so on), learn how to monitor them, and know when to seek professional help.
No one teaches you how to function as a young person with big feelings and pressure if you don't have a support network - parents, adults, mentors, friends - that already knows how to do that.
I could have used something like this when I was in my teens, so this helps make it real for those who need it now.
Your donation goes towards:
- Every $200 puts a young adult through Mental Health First Aid training to help their peers
- Scholarships for the Mental Health Maintenance workshop
- Expanding 20Talk's online resources and 60,000+ social media community
- Running large-scale interactive mental health events
To raise the money, I'm doing the 20 Hours for 20Talk Challenge on 5 and 6 December, which will see me sitting in a 2x2 metre square in a warehouse in Port Melbourne, alongside 400 other participants, with no talking and no technology for 20 hours.
I'll have a chair, sleeping pad, journal, water, food, silence. It's supposed to be a symbolic representation of the isolation and struggle that someone with mental health challenges encounters.
If you haven't been through depression yourself, the simplest way I can describe it is that everything gets heavier and nothing that usually brings happiness brings happiness anymore, until you question why you're here at all.
Getting out of bed, replying to a message, eating properly. The things you used to enjoy stop meaning much, and you start to believe it's going to stay that way. Then you stop telling people, because you don't want to be a burden, and that's when it gets dangerous, especially when you're young and don't have the life experience to realise things don't stay that way.
Personal connection to youth mental health advocacy:
So why am I doing this? I've lost 3 friends and 1 family member to suicide.
I got close myself, and I know people who have considered not being here anymore.
We have all been touched in some way by the reality of mental health. It can be dark, lonely, and confronting.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for donating if you can. If you're not in that position right now, all good, consider sharing this pls.
❤️❤️❤️