The interview went amazing. Although we changed our topic a bit beforehand Victoria took charge of questions. We drafted a couple questions in the cafeteria then headed over to her office and waited outside. We asked her if we could record and she said yes than we asked her our questions.

She never answered our questions with a simple yes or no always going into detail. 8 questions took 20 minutes! In which she also showed us this book about mental health and 30 minutes later we emailed him. Thank you Allison.

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We walked into Ever’s office and he greeted us warmly. Immediately we were greeted with open arms and we jumped right in asking “What is your experience with individuals living with mental illnesses?” he answered and his answer segwayed into our next question and the flow of the interview.

One big takeaway I had was that change comes from the person. Almost like the saying “you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” I think that is a very life lesson because people can’t do everything for you all the time and they can help but you need to help yourself as well.

In the end, he made a topic very challenging to talk about, not as sad as I was prepared for even cracking some jokes now and again and made the interview really engaging. I can’t thank him enough. I would recommend as an interview!

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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!

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