Creek Speak | Page 9

can to help them.” She truly does want to help the students. As I was interviewing her she started passionately talking about the new program that Silver Creek just adopted into the school this year which is called “Sources of Strength”. Mrs. Meiers excitedly expressed what the program is like and how she thinks it's truly going to benefit everyone in the Silver Creek High School Community. Sources of Strength’s mission Statement states, “We believe that life has ups and downs, that all of us will go through good times and tough times. Our mission is to ensure that during rough times no one gets so overwhelmed or hopeless that they want to give up. Our mission is to spread hope, help and strength into every corner of our community... We spread hope...” When talking for a good 45 minutes about the program with Mrs. Meiers, I came to the conclusion that “Sources of Strength” is here for us to normalize the positive and diffuse the negatives by using students and certain staff members trained to help spread positivity. “Not everyone has a mental illness but everyone has mental wellness, and that's where we must start.” The Sources of Strength Group will soon be embarking on its first messaging campaign ever to help spread the idea of hope, help, and strength. Teachers are also doing their part: every Wednesday in the UHS Room, teachers are taking a class on mindfulness and learning to meditate and learning how to deal with their own emotions and how to face them. Doing research for this project I came across a TED Talk by Mark Henrick called”Why We Choose Suicide.” In the talk, Mark Talks about his own struggle with battling depression and attempting suicide multiple times as a young teen in his talk he explained “When almost a quarter of 15 to 25 year-olds who die at all die by suicide, that is not acceptable...we know that 90% of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable and treatable mental illness at the time of their death. And we know that with medication, with psychotherapy, these treatments work. So we need to make these treatments more available in an informed way to everybody.” (The full TED Talk is available on YouTube.) Hopefully with the new Sources of Strength program set in place and the options more clearly started, as a student body we can promote hope, help, and strength and work together on preventing ourselves and our peers from feeling that we are alone in what we are going through and that we are out of options.