Me and my group went to Weill Cornell to watch a conference Led By Shannon M Bennett. The start of conference was mostly information about the Cornell Youth Mental Health workplace and goals. That did help let us know that this conference would be showing ages from 13-28.

As the conference kept going I got the names of a lot of doctors, that would be great for interviewing. In the conference I got to know more about the brain development in teens. This made a lot of sense to me as it connected to what we are learning in choices. The conference was also easily understood because of the amount of graphs. It showed us a example of what we could use in our presentation.

It was also interesting to me that mostly doctors were the ones who attended this talk. Overall, this conference was very helpful. I took a lot of notes and can’t wait to write about our interview with Shannon M. Bennett next!

Read more

We met with Ever Ramirez, our school counselor. During this interview we got the chance to know him better as a person and get to know our topic better. For example, we asked him what he thinks is a main cause of the rise in mental health. He stated that now awareness for mental health has risen. The rise in awareness has now resulted in more cases of mental health illnesses being found. It could also be how our world is getting very complicated at the moment.

Another thing we asked was, how does social media affect mental health? His answer was that though there isn’t much harm in it, if you spend too much time on it, it can. He also mentioned that on social media cyber bullying can come up a lot. People might feel less shame commenting online rather than saying it to a person’s face. If you do get cyber bullied it can lower your self esteem. Overall, this interview was very helpful and I am so grateful we got to interview Ever Ramirez.

Read more

Walter and I first walked into the room, which felt very welcoming. We first sat down and pressed record. Using the prepared questions it felt easier to be able to listen to Allison and gather information. I found it really interesting how social media came up a lot during the conversation. It made me think on my own how social media may actually be a rising factor in mental illnesses such as depression. It has already been shown how seeing a friend on the phone versus in person is very different.

When we asked Allison about how COVID impacted our topic it started making a lot of sense how mental illnesses uprised during that time. To the fact a lot of people felt lonely, which was understandable because at that point children didn’t even have the chance to be social at school. I really enjoyed and appreciated this interview as it was very helpful and Allison even recommended another person to the interview! He’s a professor and author named Jonathan Haidt which will hopefully be another interview coming soon!

Read more