essay competition mental health

Friday essay: Bad therapy or cruel world? How the youth mental health crisis has been sucked into the culture wars

Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne

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Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Rates of mental ill health among young people are on the rise. Between the years 2020 and 2022, 39% of Australians aged 16 to 24 had a mental disorder in the previous year , compared to 26% in that age range in 2007, and 27% of those aged 18–24 in 1997.

The recent Lancet Psychiatry commission on youth mental health documents equally steep increases in mental illness in the United States, UK and Denmark. Governments, mental health services, educational institutions and parents are struggling to respond. But what is behind these trends?

Two accounts seem to be emerging. According to one, which I’ll call the “cruel world” narrative, young people are distressed because the world is in bad shape and getting worse.

Facing climate emergency, unaffordable housing, precarious employment, rising inequality and other dire mega-trends, they are canaries in a societal coalmine. By this account, the mental health crisis is the direct result of systemic adversity.

The alternative, which I’ll call the “cultural trend” narrative, is a little less bleak. Young people are experiencing more mental illness not primarily because the world is grim and getting grimmer, but because cultural shifts have shaped how they perceive and inhabit it.

This narrative suggests a culture preoccupied with harm creates vulnerability and leads people to view life problems through a psychiatric lens. Adversity and social dislocation undoubtedly contribute to young people’s distress, but the way therapeutic culture frames their suffering makes it worse.

The two narratives offer different prescriptions.

From the “cruel world” perspective, the ultimate causes of the mental health crisis are the basic structures of our society, economy and ecology. Only systemic, macro-level changes can arrest them.

For proponents of the “cultural trend” narrative, the focus of intervention is more micro. We should challenge the social practices and technologies that create vulnerability and undermine mental health.

As a social psychologist, I take it as self-evident that adverse social environments play a leading role in the creation of mental ill health: that we can’t isolate human misery from its broader context. However, I’m equally certain that culture plays a crucial part.

A range of cultural changes that could plausibly undermine mental health are well underway: increased immersion in the digital world, rising political polarisation and preoccupation with risk and harm, among others. Separating them from the tangled skein of factors that contribute to the youth mental health crisis is a matter of urgency.

Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy , a forceful exposition of the “cultural trend” narrative, provides a golden opportunity to explore some of them.

Youth mental health and the culture wars

Journalist and cultural critic Soraya Chemaly’s recent book The Resilience Myth exemplifies the first narrative. Young people are distressed “because the world is distressing, and adults have failed them”. Their sensitivity and emotional honesty place them at higher risk of distress than their elders, and the ubiquity of trauma, oppression and existential climate threat tip that risk into illness.

Chemaly’s solutions lean towards the revolutionary. Her targets include individualism, rigid gender ideologies, capitalism and white supremacy.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation presents a version of the second narrative. Haidt does not deny the magnitude of the challenges young people face. However, he questions whether their rising rates of mental ill health directly follow increases in adversity.

This inflection point in the trajectory of young people’s mental ill health appears to have occurred in the early 2010s. However, many of the systemic trends now held responsible for the crisis – like climate change and rising income inequality – have been building over a much longer period, when rates of ill health were relatively stable. By implication, the precipitating causes must be more specific, recent developments.

Haidt identifies two such changes: the advent of smartphones and “safetyism”. His focus on smartphones has been widely reported . But his equally important emphasis on the cultural preoccupation with protecting us from harm has received less attention.

Haidt argues that parental and institutional over-protection hampers the development of young people’s resilience and autonomy. Citing the idea of “anti-fragility” he proposes that risk, challenge and failure are required to build strength.

By now, it should be obvious that the youth mental health crisis has become politicised, sucked into the vortex of the culture wars.

The crisis can be attributed either to an uncaring system that oppresses the most vulnerable, or to emerging social trends that do young minds no favours. It can be addressed either by progressive social change, such as economic redistribution and environmental protection, or by winding back some damaging cultural developments, such as promoting unsupervised play for children and restricting access to smartphones in schools .

Blaming ‘bad therapy’

Whereas Haidt spends much of his book on the damage done by young people’s immersion in the digital world, in Bad Therapy, Shrier castigates mental health experts for contributing to the crisis they claim to be addressing.

Shrier is a controversial figure. Her previous book Irreversible Damage drew protests and bans for critiquing youth gender medicine and arguing that social contagion plays a role in the rise of girls seeking gender transition.

The former lawyer and Wall Street Journal columnist, who has not previously written at length on mental health, is just as fierce in prosecuting the case against the growing influence of mental health expertise.

Bad Therapy begins by arguing that the rise in mental ill health among young people is not merely a response to deepening life challenges. Instead, Shrier writes, it is driven by destructive cultural shifts and misguided experts. She suggests many people who are experiencing ordinary problems in living have been led to believe their unhappiness is psychiatric in nature.

Shrier is quick to clarify that distress often is genuinely severe. There are “two distinct groups of young people”, she argues: those experiencing “profound mental illness” and “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad”.

This second group is Shrier’s battleground. These “worriers” have fallen victim to shifts in education and parenting, and to the expansionism of the mental health field. On this point, she doesn’t mince her words. “No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth,” she writes, and “the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them.” As a result, “we rush to remedy a misdiagnosed condition with the wrong sort of cure”.

Shrier challenges the common view that mental health interventions – therapy for short – are invariably beneficial. She reviews evidence suggesting therapy is less helpful than it is touted to be, and that it can sometimes be actively harmful. For instance, “psychological debriefing” immediately after exposure to traumas can interfere with recovery .

Mental health treatment can undermine recovery, she suggests, by “hijack[ing] our normal processes of resilience” and creating dependency on professionals. It can crystallise illness by applying diagnostic labels too liberally.

Diagnoses may bring relief to anxious and desperate parents, but they can also affect how their children perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Much like therapeutic staples such as trauma and chemical imbalance , diagnostic terms can convey the view that young people are fundamentally damaged and have little control over their predicaments.

Many of these critiques of therapy chime with familiar attacks on medicalisation . But Shrier also advances some newer criticisms. Mental health treatment can induce rumination and a passive focus on feelings: common features of anxiety and depression. “Bad therapy encourages hyperfocus on one’s emotional states, which in turn makes symptoms worse.”

Therapy can also affirm young people’s worries and encourage public sharing of distress in ways that can entrench unhelpful patterns. “A dose of repression,” Shrier counters, “appears to be a fairly useful psychological tool for getting on with life.”

Mental health workers overlook the possibility that talk therapy can have these adverse consequences, Shrier argues – although it is no less plausible that some psychological treatments may do harm than that some medications can have adverse side effects. Without questioning therapists’ desire to help, she takes the hardheaded view that they have incentives not to acknowledge the harm they may be causing.

Should teachers be delivering therapy?

The clear implication of Shrier’s argument is that we should challenge, rather than expand, therapeutic approaches to young people’s mental health. Instead, she finds that American schools are riddled with bad therapy, often under the banner of “social-emotional learning”.

Shrier maintains that social-emotional learning licenses psychologically untrained teachers to work in a therapeutic mode. It encourages excessive self-focus, demands emotional disclosure and can expose children to dual relationships, all out of view of their parents.

Social-emotional learning and related elements of therapeutic schooling don’t just encourage unhelpful inwardness, she argues. She contends they also use questionable teaching methods and draw time and energy away from academic learning.

Of one effort to smuggle emotional learning into a maths class, Shrier writes: “I began to wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of ploy by the Chinese Communist Party to obliterate American mathematical competence.” She concludes that

social-emotional learning turns out to be a lot like the Holy Roman Empire. Neither social, nor good for emotional health, nor something that can be learned.

Schools’ therapeutic missions also undermine how they educate disadvantaged students. Shrier contends that some “trauma-informed” practice prejudges students who have experienced hardship as fragile and in need of blanket mental health interventions, while lowering expectations for their behaviour and academic achievement. Meanwhile, classroom chaos is created by excessive accommodation of disruptive students.

Shrier takes aim at the outsized role “trauma” plays in currently popular accounts of mental ill health. She reserves some of her sharpest criticism for psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk , whose bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, places trauma front and centre in mental ill health, and physician Gabriel Maté , who claims trauma contributes to everything from cancer to ADHD.

Seeing childhood trauma as the buried root of most adult mental health problems conflicts with copious evidence that resilience is the normal response to adversity – and that trauma memories tend to be recalled accurately, rather than locked voiceless in the body. Shrier maintains that the concept of trauma has become trivialised through over-use. She chastises experts for characterising problems ranging from anger outbursts to procrastination as trauma responses.

In the school environment, the consequences of elevating trauma are troubling:

under the banner of “whole child” education and “trauma-informed” care, educators greet every child with the emotional analogue of a gurney, all but begging kids to hop in. They never wait to see who might be injured because every child is encouraged to see herself as overtaxed and worn out. They encourage every child, constantly, to think about herself and her struggles.

Against ‘gentle’ parenting and ‘overmanaged’ kids

Shrier condemns schools for usurping parental authority, but argues that contemporary parenting also subverts itself.

“Gentle” styles of child-rearing end up creating anxious, unresilient children whose demands are endlessly accommodated and whose dependency is reinforced. A strange combination of permissiveness and over-involvement makes for exhausted parents who are unwilling to exercise adult authority or to impose consequences on behaviour, she argues.

Liberal American parents may look askance at earlier styles of parenting, but by placing emotional wellness front and centre in their relationships with their children, they are making their task harder and more thankless.

As Shrier observes:

forty-year-old parents – accomplished, brilliant, and blessed with a spouse – treat the raising of kids like a calculus problem that was put to them in the dead of night: Get it right or I pull this trigger .

Ultimately, the failures of therapeutic parenting are another strike against the mental health experts who advocated for it. Shrier urges parents to cut themselves loose from the advice of parenting sages, for the good of their children: “love means occasionally telling an expert to get lost”.

Concretely, parents should step back, stop compulsively monitoring and over-praising their children, reduce scheduled activities, enforce consequences and encourage independent behaviour. She writes: “if you could do something at their age, let them give it a whirl”.

A parent’s goal should be to set their children free from an “overmanaged, veal-calf life” and ensure they experience “all of the pains of adulthood, in smaller doses, so that they build up immunity to the poison of heartache and loss”.

Not all therapy is bad therapy

Bad Therapy is an unashamedly polemical book. Shrier has strong views on what is wrong with the culture of mental health in the US –  and takes these supposed failings as examples of broader progressive trends she opposes.

The mental health crisis troubles her not only for its human costs, but because it erodes key conservative values: self-reliance, strength, parental authority and freedom from institutional compulsion.

Shrier’s rhetoric is sharp-elbowed, with a memorable turn of phrase. Some villains are identified and savaged, though the criticised cabal of mental health experts is often a faceless mass. The book is studded with revealing case studies and she interviews many leading scientists, like Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy , memory expert Elizabeth Loftus , leading trauma psychologist Richard McNally , and generational difference researcher Jean Twenge .

Though she presents herself as defending science against ideology, at times Shrier’s claims run ahead of the data. There is little evidence that mental health interventions are creating ill health on a large scale, for example, or that increases in self-diagnosis among young people account for increases in their levels of distress.

Some schools may implement socio-emotional learning in problematic ways. But studies typically find that they benefit academic achievement . And though there is evidence that today’s young adults are reaching some developmental milestones later than earlier generations, there is little direct evidence that gentle parenting is responsible for the delays.

Shrier tends to present the mental health world as a monolith. But anyone working in it knows it to be criss-crossed with divisions: between researchers and practitioners, consumers and professionals, medical and non-medical workers, and numerous disciplines and therapeutic tribes.

The idea that this Babel of voices is united in a process of crisis creation is hard to credit. Not all therapy is bad therapy. Indeed, many of the positions Shrier espouses – for facing challenges head on and experiencing the consequences of our behaviour, and against safetyism, over-medication and the therapeutic excavation of our childhoods – are gospel for mainstream cognitive behaviour therapists.

Correcting concerning trends

Even so, for all its exaggerations and simplifications, Bad Therapy is a timely corrective to some real and concerning trends. It is increasingly clear that over-diagnosis of mental illness is common, especially among young people, and that diagnostic labelling can have adverse implications .

It now seems likely that campaigns to boost mental health awareness sometimes backfire and pathologise ordinary unhappiness. School-based prevention initiatives are sometimes ineffective and can even reduce wellbeing.

Most of all, it is becoming obvious that although there is a high unmet need for treatment, simply expanding the current mental health system – training more therapists, funding more sessions and services, further boosting awareness of mental health, embedding a therapeutic sensibility in more of our institutions – cannot be relied on to substantially reduce mental ill health.

Research on the so-called “treatment-prevalence paradox” demonstrates that large increases in service provision have failed to reduce rates of mental illness. Current treatment practices have only modest efficacy in real-world settings. Reasons likely include the complexity and recurring nature of many mental health problems, and the low quality implementation and short-lived benefit of many treatments.

Some treatments also clearly do more harm than good, for some patients. A recent evaluation of Australia’s Better Access program, which gives Medicare rebates to help people access mental health care, found that patients who sought help for relatively mild distress were three times more likely to deteriorate than to improve (patients in more severe distress typically improved).

In this context, Shrier has some grounds to be sceptical that doing more of the same will turn around the mental health crisis. There is no question that more needs to be done – but believing that the solution is to scale up current practice seems, as Samuel Johnson said of a second marriage, a triumph of hope over experience.

Shrier addresses her concluding chapters to parents, urging them to reclaim the confidence that they know what’s right for their child. The trouble is, parents rarely know to which of Shrier’s “two distinct groups of young people” their child belongs.

How could they know? No bright line separates the supposed victims of therapy culture from the profoundly ill. Faced with a loved one’s distress, what can parents do but seek the forms of help that are currently available?

Our young people will continue to be funnelled toward mental health treatment in alarming numbers. We can only hope it will become more effective and less necessary.

• Overdiagnosis
• Gentle parenting
• Friday essay
• Youth mental health crisis

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Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?

Here’s what we can learn from the way faith communities stay rooted in the real world — and diminish the harms of the virtual one..

S eth Kaplan, an author and lecturer, spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids.

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”

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His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”

Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health

That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend?

At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction , and suicide (for both men and women ). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future , a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

In “ The Anxious Generation ” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms , from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls .

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?

What religious communities are getting right

The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure . Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person.

The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong real-world communities and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.

Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity . Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . . . unsettling change.’”

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.

What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?

One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.

Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.

This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? It’s a difficult question to answer, though many organizations , like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, and the Girl Scouts, are creatively trying to do just this . My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.

Zach Rausch is an associate research scientist at New York University, the lead researcher for the book “The Anxious Generation,” and managing editor of the Substack newsletter After Babel.

Anonymous $10M Donor Seeks to Remove Financial Barriers for Future Educators and Health Care Professionals Enrolled at Salem State

A $10 million gift to Salem State University from an anonymous donor was announced today to support scholarships that address the unmet need for students in the Maguire Meservey College of Health and Human Services and the McKeown School of Education.

The gift establishes the Clipper Scholarship and provides significant support to students who are just over the cusp of Pell-eligibility and often left out of federal and state aid programs. The investment seeks to meet students where they are and helps fund the cost of attendance, which includes tuition, room and board, books, meal plans, etc.

“With our long history of preparing front-line workers who go on to serve the Commonwealth in healthcare, education and public service-related fields, a gift of this magnitude will help us maximize student potential by lessening their financial burden and helping them graduate on time,” Sami Ansari PhD, dean of Salem State’s Maguire Meservey College of Health and Human Services said. “I am grateful that the university will be able to provide more opportunities to our accomplished students who will one day contribute to the well-being of the public.”

The gift was made in honor of the donor’s parents, who graduated from the university in the 1950s. Reflecting on his own academic journey, the donor empathizes with those who struggle with the financial constraints in obtaining a quality education and says that we must do better as a society to help students with unmet need, sharing that “these students are the future of our country.”

“Salem State’s founding principle, seeing education as the great equalizer, is as important today as it’s ever been,” Cheryl Webster, vice president of advancement and executive director of the Salem State University Alumni Association and Foundation, Inc. said. “Such extraordinary acts of philanthropy allow us to further invest in students as they build toward personal and professional success.”

“This gift, which is already having an immediate impact this fall semester, provides flexible support for students just above Pell-eligibility with approximately $11,000 in unmet need,” Vice President of Student Success Bonnie Galinski said. “Filling that gap allows even more Vikings to pursue their dreams and eventually graduate with minimal educational debt. Having the ability to consistently award significant funding to students throughout their academic career is life changing for not only our student Vikings but also their families.”

The gift represents a huge step forward for Salem State, improving the university’s position as a leading higher education institution committed to helping students meet moments of opportunity in an evolving landscape.

“Through our $75 million Meet the Moment ™ campaign, we have worked hard to ramp up efforts to provide significant support for scholarships so that deserving students can take advantage of their Salem State education,” Salem State University President John D. Keenan said. “Private philanthropy is critical to maintaining a rigorous, collaborative learning environment that encourages students to develop critical thinking skills so that they can have real societal impact. Transformative gifts of this stature help us raise our academic profile while ensuring students reach their fullest potential.”

“We are so proud to partner with donors who share our commitment to Viking student success,” Webster said.

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David French

The Loneliness Epidemic Has a Cure

By David French

Opinion Columnist

What is the most important single thing that you can do to heal our national divides and to improve the social and economic mobility of your struggling neighbors?

I’d submit that it’s not voting for the right candidate (though you should certainly do that), nor is it engaging in activism to raise visibility for a worthy cause (though I endorse that as well). Instead, it’s something that is at once much simpler but also much more difficult.

Make a new friend.

The story of modern America — especially for working-class Americans who did not go to college — is a story of declining connections, declining friendships and a loss of a sense of belonging. That sense of isolation makes people miserable, and as the misery spreads, it affects our economy and our culture. The data, quite frankly, is horrifying.

Last month, the American Enterprise Institute released its 2024 American Social Capital Survey . It exposes a stark social divide. People with high school diplomas or less spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and less time in community groups or in sports leagues than those with college degrees and higher (for simplicity, I’ll refer to the two groups as high school graduates and college graduates). And they’re less likely to host friends, family and neighbors in their homes.

Let’s pause here for a moment. Think about the consequences of this distinction: Tens of millions of working-class Americans experience a social reality different from that of their more educated peers. The lack of common spaces and common experiences means that isolation can become self-perpetuating.

The friendship numbers are just as sobering. Americans of all stripes are reporting that they have declining numbers of friends, but the decline is most pronounced among high school graduates. Between 1990 and 2024, the percentage of college graduates who reported having zero close friends rose to 10 percent from 2 percent, which is upsetting enough. Among high school graduates, the percentage rose to a heartbreaking 24 percent from 3 percent.

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In the wellness industry, your mental health is for sale

Kelly Brogan attends the in goop Health Summit on January 27, 2018 in New York City. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Jonathan N. Stea is a practising clinical psychologist, an adjunct assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, and the author of Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry , from which this essay has been adapted.

In 2018, millions of subscribers to Goop – Gwyneth Paltrow’s wildly successful natural lifestyle company – were introduced to a new promoted product: the Implant O’Rama , a do-it-yourself coffee-enema device. The product’s website claimed that coffee enemas “can mean relief from depression, confusion, general nervous tension, many allergy related symptoms, and most importantly, relief from severe pain.” The company told its consumers: “Ask not what your colon can do for you, but rather, what you can do for your colon.” Coffee enemas were even endorsed on Goop by seemingly respectable physicians: namely, a cardiologist, Alejandro Junger, identified as an “adrenal fatigue expert,” and “holistic psychiatrist” Kelly Brogan in her New York Times bestseller, A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives.

What’s the problem? Well, it turns out that shooting coffee up your bum will not help with depression or any other health concern. Coffee enemas have a long history in the alternative-medicine community despite their lack of credible evidence . They were first introduced as a part of the Gerson Therapy, which was developed by a physician, Max Gerson, in the 1930s for the treatment of degenerative diseases, including cancer. Modern proponents of the therapy still claim that coffee enemas work by helping with liver and in­testinal detoxification. The scientific reality is that there is no medical theory or body of research supporting the use of coffee enemas, and in fact they can be quite dangerous and result in burns, inflammation, bacteria in the blood­stream, and even death.

Goop subscribers who purchased Ms. Brogan’s book about depression were introduced to even more products, services and “natural treatments for whole-body wellness” beyond coffee enemas. They were told in Ms. Brogan’s book that a laundry list of supplements was critical to their health and that “un­less you are growing your own organic food in a bubble hermetically sealed from the ravages of the modern industrial world, strategic supplementation is almost always going to help you get better and stay better.” They were recommended to doubt whether the scientific construct of depression was even real and were warned about the purported dangers of antidepressant medication, Advil, Lipitor, Prilosec, fluoride, fragrances, genetically mod­ified foods (GMOs), antibiotics, vaccines and birth-control pills. In short, they were sold a cornucopia of misinformation.

There exists little evidence to support the vast majority of Ms. Brogan’s claims. For example, in the American Psychological Association’s official clin­ical practice guidelines for the treatment of depression – which were de­veloped by health professionals from psychology, psychiatry and primary care, as well as community members who self-identified as having had depression – it’s recommended that depression be treated with evidence-based psychotherapies and antidepressants. After reviewing the science, the guidelines don’t recommend anything resembling Ms. Brogan’s unnecessary and expensive testing and supplementing or dietary plan. And of course, there’s no mention of coffee enemas.

This problem, of course, is much larger and older than coffee enemas, Ms. Brogan and her book. Snake-oil salesmen have been around forever, but it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that a guy named Clark Stanley sold actual “snake oil liniment” as a cure-all for various health conditions – incidentally, it didn’t work, and it didn’t even contain actual snake oil.

The problem is that snake-oil salesmen, in the spirit of Clark Stanley, never went away. In the world of mental-health care, scientists have estimated that there are at least 600 “brands” of psychotherapy, an unreasonably and quickly growing number, many of which are ineffective and could be harmful. Beyond that world exist countless unregulated providers of mental-health-related services in the wellness industry and alternative-medicine community who market themselves as “life coaches,” “wellness consultants” and – depending on particular countries and jurisdictions – other various non-legally protected titles, such as “therapists,” “psychotherapists,” “counsellors” and “practitioners.”

As a clinical psychologist, I have encountered many patients who received pseudoscientific assessments and treatments for their mental-health concerns. The tidal wave of pseudoscientific mental-health practices originates both within and outside of the mental-health professions. The global health and wellness industry has an estimated value of more than US $5.6-trillion , which includes legitimate sources of health – such as club memberships and exercise classes – as well as alternative-medicine products and services that purport to improve health, based on baseless or exaggerated claims and questionable evidence of safety and effectiveness.

At the end of the day, your mental health is on the line. And your mental health is precious. You need it to experience joy. You need it to live with purpose, to function in society and to be there for your loved ones. There’s no price tag high enough to measure its value.

Yet, in the wellness industry, your mental health is for sale. You’ve been told you lack it and it’s available for purchase. You just need to buy the latest book with the latest 30-day diet plan, swallow 15 supplements “they” don’t want you to know about, cleanse the toxins from your body by following “10 easy steps,” spiritually awaken on a five-day wellness retreat, or undergo the revolutionary new therapy that most doctors haven’t heard about. That cheapened, commodified version of mental health is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s sexy. It’s alluring. And it’s a sham. It will take you down a yellow brick road paved with pseudoscience, leaving your mental health for dead.

What’s the solution? Pseudoscience and wellness aren’t going anywhere, but it’s rejuvenating to know that we can affect their demand. While it’s the mandate of regulatory bodies of various health professions to protect the public from harm, a vitally important, perhaps counterintuitive lesson is this: We cannot rely merely on care providers and regulatory bodies to protect our mental health. The onus is also on us to empower ourselves with knowledge, such that we can protect ourselves from mental-health scams, charlatanry, and poor or misguided health practices. A person who views their mental health with a scientific lens is advantaged. Grifters hold less power over those who can see through their charades.

Providers that advertise their services to address mental-health concerns but that do not value, respect or understand the role of science in mental-health care risk compromising the safety of patients. And unfortunately for patients, it can very much be a buyer-beware approach to their mental health, both within our health care systems and in the unregulated space where mental-health care is marketed and sold. Improving the science and mental-health literacy skills of both the general public and health care professionals can help mitigate this alarming problem. In part, this involves learning how to spot and avoid false information and pseudoscientific practices.

Unlike rocket science, each of us has experience with the topic of mental health, which makes it easier to believe we can assess claims made without evidence and make claims of our own without expertise. But false information is worse than no information – and without science, it prevails.

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WPA Medical Students Essay Competition “Improving Mental Health in the Global World Using the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals” 2024

Updated: Aug 22

The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) announces the winner(s) of its 2024 Medical Student Essay Competition, a prestigious WPA Presidential initiative supported by the United Nations Secretariat – Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development Goals.

Earlier this year, the WPA invited medical students from around the world to write and submit an essay of up to 3,000 words on the theme: "Improving Mental Health in the Global World Using the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The competition was designed to encourage innovative thinking and provided an opportunity for medical students to highlight mental health's critical role in global development, giving them a global platform to present their ideas.

The response to this year's competition came from 41 countries, 93 medical schools, and 6 continents.

The essays addressed the complex interplay between mental health and the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a high-quality standard throughout.

The selection process was rigorous following an adapted version of the Harvard Crimson Global Essay Competition (HCGEC) criteria which judges focus, clarity, academic rigor, structure, clarity, originality, and the ability to synthesise complex information.

Nine zonal representatives ( Chawanun Charnsil, Valsamma Eapen, Kostas Fountoulakis, Vinay Kumar, Amine Larnout, Nikolay Negay, Yong Chon Park, Thelma Sanchez, Johannes Wancata), as well as Muhammad Waqar Azeem, chair of WPA Special Interest Group on Medical Students and Bernardo NG, a member of Special Interest Group and Co-chair of WPA Congress Scientific Committee in Mexico, along with Nuhamin Petros from the office of the President of the WPA at KI, and Danuta Wasserman (President, WPA). 

The judging panel was deeply impressed by the innovative approaches and comprehensive analyses presented in the essays. The submissions demonstrated a profound understanding of how mental health intersects with various aspects of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The global interest in the competition underscores the critical need to integrate mental health into broader discussions on sustainable development, highlighting its essential role in achieving a healthier and more equitable world.

We would like to extend our congratulations to the 12 finalists, whose exceptional essays made this competition a true celebration of literary talent (in alphabetical order, by last name):

After careful deliberation, the winners of the 2024 WPA Medical students’ essay competition are Bahar Fazel and Vitor Santana

Bahar Fazel  is a 5th-year medical student at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Her winning essay ‘ Meeting the Future in a Happy Spirit ’ offers a thoughtful and introspective examination of the intersection between contemporary progress, mental health, and sustainable development, effectively highlighting the need for a holistic approach to well-being that transcends mere material success.

Vitor Santana  is a 5th-year medical student at the University of Pernambuco (Universidade de Pernambuco) in Brazil. His winning essay  ‘Minding the Minds in the World We Share’ intertwines the   urgent global challenges of climate change, social inequality, and mental health, presenting a compelling and well-researched argument emphasising these issues' interconnectedness and the critical need for integrated, sustainable solutions .

The winners will be honoured at the 24th World Congress of Psychiatry (WCP) on 14th-17th November in Mexico City.

The WPA leadership, President Danuta Wasserman, and Dr Juwang Zhu from the United Nations Secretariat – Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development Goals, extend their heartfelt congratulations to the deserving finalists and look forward to welcoming the winners at the 24th World Congress of Psychiatry in Mexico City.

Author: Danuta Wasserman, WPA President

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NIH Announces Winners of 2023-2024 High School Mental Health Essay Contest

May 31, 2024 • Institute Update

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is pleased to announce the winners of the  2024 Speaking Up About Mental Health    essay contest. Out of more than 370 submissions across 33 states, NIH awarded 24 youth (ages 16-18) finalists with gold, silver, bronze, and honorable mention prizes.

Supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the  Eunice Kennedy Shriver  National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the essay contest invited youth to address mental health and reduce mental health stigma that young people may face when seeking mental health treatment.

The winning essays addressed complicated topics such as stigma, trauma, resilience, equity, anxiety, and more. Teens also wrote about specific ideas for improving well-being, such as broader access to leisure sports, reducing time spent on social media, and normalizing mental health treatment and care.

NIH awarded a total of $15,000 in cash prizes to gold, silver, bronze, and honorable mention recipients. Read the winning essays at  nimhd.nih.gov/EssayContest   .

Gold winners

• Max, California - Tenacity Through Tumultuousness
• Michaela, Maryland - Exposing the Impact of Social Media on Teenage Mental Health: A Journey of Self-Discovery
• Raphael, Hawaii  - Let's CHAT: Mental Health Impact on Teens Living with Speech Challenges

Silver winners

• Aditi, California – Embracing Authenticity
• Anna, New York - Change Our Approach: How Sports Can Play a Role in Mental Health
• Ciniyah, Illinois - The Roots Affect the Fruit: A Personal Journey of Trauma to Triumph
• Kathleen, Maryland - Behind A Perfect Life
• Paige, Texas - Learn to Live and Accept Your Journey
• Rylie, Maryland - Drowning in Plain Sight

Bronze winners

• Argiro, Pennsylvania - Out in the Open: A Conversation about Mental Health
• Dresden, Maryland - Normalize the Care to Destigmatize the Conditions
• Gabriel, New Jersey - Keeping My Head Up: My Experience with Dad's Brain Cancer
• Hailey, Arkansas - Access for Adolescent Athletes
• Jordan, New Jersey - A Weighted Wait
• Kathryne, North Carolina - Embracing Openness: Unveiling Silent Struggles Surrounding Mental Health
• Maya, Maryland - Speaking up for Change
• Rachel, California - Embracing the Journey Towards Mental Health Acceptance
• Savannah, New Jersey - Taking a Step Today, for a Better Tomorrow

Honorable mentions

• Agaana, Maryland – Accountability for Authority: The Responsibilities of Schools
• Gisele, Pennsylvania - Breaking the Silence
• Jillian, Illinois - Navigating Mental Illness in Teens
• Kyle, North Carolina - How the Neglect of Mental Health Within Black Communities Causes Underlying Issues
• Mason, Maryland - Social Media as a Possible Method to Reduce Mental Health Stigma
• Minsung, Georgia - Hope to Bridge the Gap

If you are in crisis and need immediate help, call or text the  988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline     at  988  (para ayuda en español, llame al 988) to connect with a trained crisis counselor. The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. The deaf and hard of hearing can contact the Lifeline using their preferred relay service or by dialing 711 and then 988.

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Monday, April 29, 2019

Nationwide essay contest challenges high schoolers to be frank about mental health

Multiple winners to be awarded by NIH and the Calvin J. Li Memorial Foundation.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for youths aged 15 to 24, yet only about half of young adults with a mental disorder receive treatment. In an effort to address this disparity and further conversations about mental health among high schoolers, the National Institutes of Health invites students ages 16 to 18 years old to participate in the “ Speaking Up About Mental Health! ” essay contest. Essays should explore ways to address the stigma and social barriers that adolescents from racial and ethnic minority populations may face when seeking mental health treatment. The contest is led by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in collaboration with the Calvin J. Li Memorial Foundation , and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). NIMH and NIMHD are components of NIH.

“Teens have important stories to tell about their experiences with mental health treatment, and we hope this contest will give them an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas. It’s clear we need to work with them to better understand mental health stigma and the barriers they may face when seeking mental health treatment,” said Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of NIMH.

Ideas for essay topics could include:

• Creative ways to start a conversation about mental health or related stigma
• Innovative approaches to remove, reduce, or lower barriers to mental health treatment
• Suggested changes in school policies or practices that could help reduce stigma
• Other areas of concern to individuals and their communities with respect to mental health

This contest was started as part of the Healthy Mind Initiative , which aims to increase mental health awareness and promote suicide prevention in Asian American and Pacific Islander youth, although the contest is open to all high school youths nationwide. The goal of the initiative is to reach a population that may view mental health care negatively, or may not consider it at all, due to stigma, lack of awareness and education, or differences in cultural conceptualization of mental health.

“Every year millions of Americans struggle with mental illness, which does not discriminate,” said Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D., director of NIMHD. “Severe mental Illness occurs in all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups and access to treatment is a special challenge for disadvantaged populations.”

Contest rules and prize information:

There is no application fee to participate, and entries should be submitted by May 31, 2019 on Challenge.gov . Winners will be announced on Sept. 30, 2019. The contest is open to all current U.S. or U.S. territory high school students ages 16 to 18 at the time of submission. Some entrants may not be eligible to receive an NIH prize, but may be recognized as a finalist and eligible for a non-NIH cash prize from the Calvin J. Li Memorial Foundation. Prize winners and finalists will have their essays posted on the Healthy Mind Initiative website.

For more information on the rules of the contest and registration requirements see the contest webpage at www.challenge.gov or by contacting [email protected] .

For further information:

Nancy Tian, Ph.D. , LCDR, U.S. Public Health Service

Erin Shannon , NIH

About the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website .

About the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD): NIMHD leads scientific research to improve minority health and eliminate health disparities by conducting and supporting research; planning, reviewing, coordinating, and evaluating all minority health and health disparities research at NIH; promoting and supporting the training of a diverse research workforce; translating and disseminating research information; and fostering collaborations and partnerships. For more information, visit the NIMHD website .

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov .

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Speaking Up About Mental Health! This Is My Story

NATIONAL ESSAY CHALLENGE WINNERS

Make it Noteworthy: Let's Have a Discussion Alexis North Carolina

Mental illness is often brought up in school, but never fully discussed. This lack of discussion can create effects that are tragic, and yet it's completely preventable. How will we start the discussion?

Breaching the Stigma: Improving Mental Health Education Amanda Maryland

It should not take a tragedy to prompt community discussions about mental illnesses. By integrating lessons about mental health into curriculums and increasing accessibility to mental health resources, schools can promote a deeper understanding and awareness about this highly stigmatized condition.

Bent Not Broken Anastasia Kentucky

Follow my journey and learn how we can fight the national crisis of childhood trauma. Learn how our schools can help those of us who are “bent, not broken.”

Improving the Treatment of Mental Illness in the Black Community Andrew Maryland

How can mental health treatment be improved in the Black community? In my essay, I describe the relationship between mental health services and underprivileged areas, discuss barriers preventing individuals from receiving treatment, and detail methods to better target treatment through community outreach and government action.

Vitalis Jasmine Colorado

I share a piece of my story — my struggles, my frustrations, my mental health — in hopes of illuminating that mental health affects all, regardless of race, age, location, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, political views, and religious beliefs. I share some of my ideas in hopes of breaking the stigma, opening up conversation, inspiring initiatives to promote mental health awareness and acceptance, and ultimately, motivating at least one more person to unite in this fight.

Now I Understand Jayvion North Carolina

My essay, "Now I Understand" is about realizing what my mental health diagnosis meant and how many people in the world have the same struggles as I do. My essay led to the development of a mental health awareness survey and self-inventory checklist to be used within the juvenile justice centers in North Carolina to highlight the connection between mental health issues and juvenile offender activity.

Break the Stigma! Kaylee Virginia

High schools have an alarming lack of mental health resources despite the fact that 20% of students will have a severe mental illness while in high school. A student tackled this issue by educating peers and teachers in her area about the dangers of mental health.

Rising Up: Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Suffering in Silence Lili Maryland

When it comes to mental health, students suffer in silence for a multitude of reasons, whether it be the stigma or the lack of knowledge of this complex and vague topic at an appropriate age. To combat this issue, Rising Up was uniquely created to foster important conversations about mental health between middle school students as they navigate the difficulties and challenges that come with growing up.

No More Silence Lydia Virginia

Moved by issues of mental illness that have impacted my Korean-American community and public high school, I sought to take action. Though my experiences and the lessons learned along the way, I share what's worked for me to help others spread mental health awareness in their own communities.

Find Your Center Sahithi California

Challenges to youth mental health care include cost, stigma, and the lack of early intervention services. Creating a national network of free, youth-led mental health centers based in local communities would address these barriers to encourage help-seeking behaviors among young people.

Pushing Through Fear Morgan Kentucky

Eight-year-old Morgan Guess was diagnosed as clinically depressed after a bullying experience at school. Instead of blaming others or ignoring what happened to her, she chose to tell her story and pushed through her own fears to find a way to help other kids get the mental health services they need.

Peer Programs: A Solution for Youth by Youth Samskruthi California

In our current mental health system, youth often experience a lack of accessibility to mental health care, with stigma and confusion that make the process of getting help more difficult than it should be. Implementing peer programs in schools would reach youth widely, increase mental health literacy, reduce stigma, provide peer support, and encourage youth to seek help.

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Nationwide essay contest challenges high schoolers to be frank about mental health

NIH announces winners of high school mental health essay contest

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ESSAY CONTEST – Break the Silence of Mental Health

February 18, 2021

This contest aims to provide a platform for teens to express opinions and ideas associated with mental health and life challenges. Through the contest, we want to develop an understanding of the stigma associated with mental health among adolescents, and also learn the barriers faced by the youth to speaking up about the issues and challenges.

Ideas for essay topics could include :

• Break the silence and reduce the stigma about mental health
• The role of parenting in building good mental health in children
• Positive impact of friendships and relationships on mental health
• Innovative approaches to reduce communication barriers between immigrant parents and children
• Every Day Begins with a Hope
• Tell a story about a hero with mental health challenges
• Creative solutions that can help reduce stigma about mental health
• COVID-19 impact on youth mental health and suggested changes that could prevent the mental health issues.
• Speaking up about mental health and why it is important?
• Creative ways to start a conversation about mental health or related stigma

Awards: First prize (1): $300 Second Prize (2): $200 Third Prize (3): $100

General Submission Guidelines:

Poetry, fiction, prose, drawing and films are not allowed to enter this contest.   Please submit c reative Nonfiction.

CREATIVE NONFICTION : Creative writing with a factual basis, between 1500 and 2000 words, is a must. Examples can include diary entries, autobiographical writing, letters, personal essays and literary journalism.

The closing date for entries is midnight on May 31, 2021. We cannot accept any entries received after this date. Please  read the submission guidelines below  for full details on how to enter and ensure you complete the entry.

Submission guidelines (please read before submitting):

• Entry to this contest is free.
• Entrants must be high school students.
• Entries must be typed and in English.
• Entries must be the entrant’s own original work and must not have previously been published either in print or online.
• We will accept entries written at any time as long as they have not previously been published or earned an award
• We can only accept entry by email:

Entrants should send a single email with   their full name, phone number and entry title as the subject   to   [email protected]   by   midnight on May 15, 2021.

Entries must be submitted as WORD attachments to the email. NO Google doc sharing is allowed. NO PDF or picture file is allowed. The entry should not be typed in the body of the email. It MUST be an attachment. Attachments   should be compatible Word files only .

Please name each file with student’s first name and last name and the title of the entry.   Do not put name, initials or anything that may identify you on any file except the google entry form and in the subject bar .

Here is the google form link:   https://forms.gle/6ov27vFX9WLaPQE49   . When you are ready to email your entry to us, then submit your google form immediately. Emailing your entry and submitting google form should be done one after another.

For further information, please contact:

[email protected] or   847-380-0018

Speak Up for Mental Health

Essay Contest for Teens Under Way

Know a teen with something to say about mental health? “Speaking Up About Mental Health! This Is My Story,” a national essay challenge cosponsored by NIMHD, NIMH and NICHD, aims to start conversations about mental health and encourage young people to seek help for mental health issues. U.S. high school students ages 16-18 are invited to submit a short essay. 

Topics may include resilience, ending stigma, improving communication among peers and adults and more. Submissions will be accepted through Apr. 30. Winners will be announced in September. Multiple winners will be chosen to receive cash prizes. For details, visit https://www.nimhd.nih.gov/programs/edu-training/mental-health-essay-contest /.

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Your view on: Mental Health

W e l c o m e  t o  t h e :  australian mental health awareness essay competition.

The Australian Mental Health Awareness Essay Competition is an essay competition for young people aged 13 and above to talk about mental health.

Mental health receives a lot of discrimination, social stigma and disregard from many. Although we should all know what mental health issues mean, only a small proportion truly understand the struggles, and of this small proportion, only a handful have really tried to help those in need from the deterioration of being afraid of our own minds.

The idea behind this mental health essay competition is for you to speak about your journey through combating mental health issues, your struggles along the way, and your view on mental health. The first step toward overcoming issues surrounding mental health is expressing yourself, so others can build a better understanding of what is truly happening inside of you.

Speak Up, Speak Out, Sp eak About

Mental Health

Mental health is an evergrowing issue around the world, yet many have not recognised the struggles of people going through this on a day to day basis. The Australian Mental Health Awareness Essay Competition is here to support and provide a new way for victims of mental health to speak up, speak out and speak about their journey against mental health!

Speak up, speak out, speak about!

Info, guidelines.

- Open to all Australian students aged between 13-18​

- 800 word essays about a new topic every year!

- Free competition participation

- Encourage bright mental health for OUR youth

- Reducing stigma around associated challenges

What's your view on this years topic?

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- Make change just like others

- Read essays from past competition winners!

- Find inspiration to write your own essay

Gain Inspiration

What are you waiting for!

Visit our Information and Guidelines page for more information

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Teens speak up about mental health stigma in national essay contest

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Mental health is an essential aspect of overall well-being, and it is important for people of all ages, including teenagers. Unfortunately, there’s still a significant stigma surrounding mental health care, and many teens hesitate to seek help due to fear, shame, or misconceptions.

To encourage teens to be a part of the solution, the contest is open to students ages 16 to 18 years old to participate in the “Speaking Up About Mental Health” essay contest. This contest gives teens the opportunity to make their voices heard and explore ways to reduce mental health stigma that young people may face when seeking mental health treatment.

The topic is meant to be broad, but ideas for essay topics could include:

• The impact of mental health stigma on teens

• The media’s role in perpetuating or addressing mental health stigma

• The role of family and friends in reducing mental health stigma

• Cultural barriers to mental health care

• School policies or practices that could help reduce stigma

The contest, supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, will award a total of $15,000 in cash prizes to multiple winners.

Through these short essays, teens can shed light on the mental health challenges they or their peers face. They can also share innovative ideas and insights for reducing stigma and helping teens seek mental health support without judgment or fear.

The contest began Dec. 1 and will run through its Jan. 16 deadline. Winners will be announced May 31, 2024. For more information, see the contest webpage at www.challenge.gov or contact [email protected].

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