Last October, in honor of Mental Health Awareness Week, a group of students from Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram, Maine created their annual Hope Board. The board, shaped like a giant tulip, was displayed in the lobby and contained her anonymous teenage wishes. Some students were hoping to pass driver's education or have a successful playoff season. Others expressed more complex aspirations. One student wrote, “Be happy rather than angry.” Another wrote: “I wish people would be kinder and more mature.”
Kamryn Barron, 17, established the board as founder of Sacopee's Yellow Tulip Team, a student group dedicated to mental health. “For some kids, it's an outlet to express and vocalize what's bothering them,” she says.
Barron has struggled with eating disorders, anxiety, and depression. She is bisexual and she doesn't always feel supported. “It’s vindication to be able to share with others what so many of us ignore or struggle with here,” she said.
Sacopee's Yellow Tulip Team is one of about 150 such clubs supported by the Yellow Tulip Project, a mental health education and advocacy nonprofit. Co-founded in 2016 by Julia Hansen, a Maine high school student who lost two of her best friends to suicide, the nonprofit organization aims to destigmatize mental illness and help students prioritize their mental health. I am working for this purpose.
At Sacopee Valley, the club welcomes students every Monday with upbeat music and shares mental health information through morning announcements. Every fall he plants tulip bulbs in the Hope Garden, and this year he planted 500 tulip bulbs, and in the spring he celebrates the flower's restorative power with a wellness day. During the group's regular meetings, students may discuss stress reduction techniques as well as homophobia, socioeconomic inequality, and the various prejudices that many teens experience in rural communities that tend to be conservative.
In recent years, nonprofit organizations that support school-based mental health clubs have found that their programs are in demand. This increase is the result of two phenomena: an increase in the number of young people struggling with mental health and a lack of resources to help them. When schools seek solutions, students are often the ones leading the effort.
“When you think about mental health, it's not just crisis intervention,” says Lisa Padilla, a senior behavioral social scientist at the RAND Corporation who has studied mental health clubs. “Peer-based organizations create an environment within schools that says, 'We care about your well-being and we know that it's part of the whole person you are.'” This message goes a long way in making students feel safe and empowered to talk about their needs. ”
