On February 2nd, my group had the opportunity to join the Women’s Representation in the Media group for a workshop led by the Paley Center for Media. This is an institution that promotes safety in using the media and how best to navigate it. We were shown a series of clips from old shows, music videos, and movies, that showed mainly how women were portrayed in the media. This was extremely fascinating and taught me about how deeply rooted many of these stereotypes are. In addition to this, the woman leading the discussion gave us a brief overview on how these exaggerations promote bad body image which can lead to eating disorders. It taught me about how a show that might not have a necessary malicious intent can still have an extremely detrimental impact on young teens.

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My group and I met with Rebecca Benghiat, who is the President and CEO of the JED Foundation. The JED Foundation is a mental health organization that provides support and suicide prevention resources focused towards teens and young adults. During our meeting with Rebecca, she explained to us what exactly the foundation does and what their main priorities are. She was extremely thorough with her answers which gave us a lot of information in relation to our topic.
Rebecca explained the origin of the foundation to us, which was a very heartbreaking story about a suicide involving a loved one that inspired the founders to provide support to others around them struggling. We learned about the crisis of mental health in teens, which Rebecca explained to us using details about their research and resources that they provide to help those struggling, such as new workshops that try to make it easier for teens to talk about their mental health. Her story was extremely fascinating to hear about, especially how passionate she was about her job and the work that she does. Overall, this interview was extremely informational and taught us a lot about the mental health crisis in teens and how best to help those around you who are struggling.

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On January 20th, my group met with a mental health professional, Ellen Kelty, over Zoom interview. We asked her details about her job, what the hardest parts of it are, what she sees affect teens the most, and more. She was an extremely fascinating person to speak to and I learned a lot from this interview.
Ellen told us about how she speaks with many kids who have first-hand trauma, which really showed me how hard it is to work in this profession. She shared with us the tactics she uses to help kids who are struggling, and what she’d recommend to those with people around them who also need help. Additionally, she told us about many resources and organizations that she trusts and shares with her students, which all seem extremely interesting. She told us about the wide range of issues that she deals with, and how she is able to handle speaking to kids who struggle with extreme mental health issues. Her job and extensive knowledge of it told us a lot about how mental health presents itself in teens, and we look forward to hopefully reaching out and researching more of the organizations she told us about.

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On January 20th, me and my group met with Ty, Joanne, and Andy at the LREI High School. They are three of the psychologists at the LREI High School and Middle school. We spoke to them about their experience with how mental health presents itself in schools. We were curious about many things, such as how we can help those around us struggling with mental health, or what issues they see impact teens the most.
The discussion was extremely interesting and taught me a lot about how professionals handle adolescents who are struggling with their mental health. I learned more about how extremely common it is for teens to be dealing with these issues, and what resources our school provides for it. It was especially interesting to hear about the factors of mental health issues, such as lack of sleep and social media. I think that these are something that affects almost all teens and it really put it into perspective when we had professionals speak to us about it. In conclusion, this was a very informative interview that definitely shined light on the struggles that teens face in terms of their mental health.

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