 Now we would like to take a moment to acknowledge all indigenous and first people of the land and space in which we leave and breathe. For our community at Highland College, we recognize that we are on stolen occupied Duwamish, Coast Salish, Muckleshoot, MPL plans, and we want to thank all relations and tribes today as we prepare to hold space as a community. We recognize that all of us are joining this conversation from different locations through zoom. And so let us also acknowledge the indigenous and first people of the land and space in which you currently occupy. Further, we respectfully acknowledge the enslaved people, primarily of African descent, who provided exploited labor on which this country was built with little to no recognition. Today, we are in debt to their labor and labor of many black and brown bodies that continue to work in the shadows for our collective benefit. I now would like to pass on the virtual microphone to Jenny Sandler, who will introduce today's guest speaker. Good morning Highland College. My name is Jenny Sandler. I use she her pronouns and I am the associate dean of accessibility resources. It is wonderful to have you all joining us today for our second disability Justice Week presentation. I am honored to introduce our speaker today Diana chow. Diana is a speaker for active minds, the nation's premier nonprofit, supporting student and youth adult young adult mental health. Diana chow is a first generation Chinese American from Los Angeles, currently studying geosciences history and diplomacy at Princeton University. Diana was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 13 years old, and is a suicide attempt survivor and suicide loss survivor. In her darkest moments, she discovered healing through writing, adopting the motto, writing is humanity distilled into ink. Diana shares with audiences aspects of minority mental health from what it was like growing up below the poverty line with parents who didn't speak English to the power that even the smallest acts of kindness have had on your life. She also focuses on in depth actionable mental health education that can be used to support oneself and each other. Diana also founded letters to strangers, a global youth for youth mental health nonprofit, impacting over 35,000 people on six continents. For this work, she became the youngest recipient of NAMI's young leader award, the youngest ever winner of the Unilever Young Entrepreneurs Award, Oprah magazines 2019 health hero, one of 30 global team leaders in 2017. And the only American winner of the global change makers 2019 cohort. Diana will start by sharing a video that talks more about active minds and their incredible impact. Please join me in welcoming Diana chow. Thank you so much for having me bear with me for one second as I go through the whole shenanigans of sharing a PowerPoint. Let me one second. Maybe share this. This is, it's always, you know, you think no matter how many times you do this sometimes it still ends up being a little glitchy. So I appreciate your patience in bearing with me here. Now it should, there we go. Okay. I'm trying to make sure that you guys can see the full screen. Are you able to see the full screen. Yes. Okay, okay. I was worried there for a second. Okay. Still able to see the full screen. Yes. Perfect. All right. We are good to go then. We play the video. Getting on a college campus for the first time can be so overwhelming because you're kind of facing the world by yourself for the first time. Growing up, I did have a lot of family members who suffered from mental health challenges. It wasn't something that was always talked about. It's been very difficult to talk about what does it mean to be sad versus to be depressed? What does it mean to be stressed versus to be anxious? After losing my friend, I needed something. I was struggling a lot myself. I started Active Minds when I was a freshman in college after losing my brother, Brian, my only sibling to suicide. Active Minds is a national nonprofit organization focused on changing the conversation about mental health. We're most well known for mobilizing young adults to get involved in and change culture around mental health. We know that life is tough for young adults, and we also know that it's not just the students who have mental illness that have issues. It's all students. We have enough research to know that all students are dealing with things like depression and anxiety and the epidemic of loneliness. Active Minds is serving as this institution on a campus that is getting students talking, having programming during Suicide Prevention Month, having stress relief activities during exams, screening movies, having panel discussions and keynote speakers all with a mental health theme so that it's not just that we're talking about mental health when there's a crisis, but we're talking about mental health every day. One of the things about our partnership with Active Minds is that they are creative and engaging and relatable. It's just in this easy language, vernacular, that you use on a normal, and I think that helps to decrease the stigma. It helps to start the conversation. I love that Active Minds is able to make the topic of mental health very broad, so that way all people feel included in it. We were thrilled to start working with the RAND Corporation to understand if Active Minds was really making a difference. It was a longitudinal study. It has shown that the presence of an Active Minds chapter on a campus just that alone makes people access counseling more, feel more comfortable. Those students had lower stigma and improved attitudes around mental health simply because they felt like their campus cared. That's unparalleled in the mental health field. It's amazing the progress that this movement is making. I feel that through your work and in the generations to come, you're at a tipping point. We really see ourselves as the organization that is going to propel change in America around mental health. They're the leading organization on college campuses. All of our players come from college campuses, so now when you come into the National Football League, guess what? We're going to continue the conversation. We're going to help you to continue the conversation. So no better way to do that than with our partnership with Active Minds. When Color Street chose to partner with Active Minds, we knew that they had an amazing story to tell. Having a national reach through our network of independent sales associates and customers, Active Minds has given us the language we need to help them get the conversation going in the communities where they are. I think what Active Minds has done has been an extraordinary contribution to not only college campuses, but as a model for what we can do in civil society to make sure that we look out for each other in the same way that we hope people will look out for ourselves. The empathy, the knowledge I gain from Active Minds is something that I will carry with me long after graduating from college. Active Minds has just changed my life. It's something that I'm not sure I would be here without. It was my savior, it was my passion, and it's something that I will never forget. Active Minds is saving lives. Active Minds is a changemaker. Help us as we continue to change the conversation about mental health. Thank you guys so much for taking a look at the video. I will note that I do see a little bubble at the top of my screen saying there were new chat messages. But because I'm sharing the screen, I'm afraid of the chat opening up and blocking the content for a bit. So if you have anything that is urgent for me to know, feel free to interrupt me or ask one of the people who are in charge of this to interrupt me. Happy to listen to whatever you have to voice, but there will be a Q&A at the end. So if you have any questions you can hold off until then. I would love to start by reading for you a letter. I don't know what to write so I just pull on the bevels of my laptop keys with my fingernails. I pull and pull and pull until it starts to hurt. And I stare blankly at nothing until tears well up again. And I stop so hard. I wonder if my heart is ringing, it's self dry. I don't know what to say except that sometimes everything hurts so bad I don't know what to do. My arms quick and my legs shake and I am a puddle. I am a string I am a prayer wavering on existence but never quite making it there. Hot cold burns up my arms and elephant wakes up in my head. I can't think around it. I wonder, I wonder what would happen if I just tore this elephant out dumped it down to a stretcher and shipped it out of my brain. How would that weightlessness feel like? How do people live without that anvil seared into their mouths? I wonder what it's like to laugh without having to claw your throat open first. I should stop this here. I can feel myself slipping. I don't know. I guess I'll talk soon. I have nothing else to say, even though I feel like I should end this on a positive note. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And what are you going to do about it? What am I going to do about it? I wrote that letter for myself. See, at 14 years old, I still dabbled in the dazzled hair bands and wore t-shirts with neon slogans like, you're looking at awesome. So as you can probably imagine, even since I was very young, I was not exactly the most innocent child. I found trouble everywhere. Or if you ask me, adventures. You know, I was sassy. I convinced myself I was funny, tried to be punk, pretended like I was a Chinese princess. You can see with this photographic evidence here on the screen. You know, maybe that's why people didn't seem to care when I started to disappear. Maybe I didn't know it, or maybe I somehow subconsciously wanted it that way, but the greatest trick I ever played wasn't on others, but on myself. You know, a few years ago, I was interviewing people about mental health around San Francisco from the wealthiest districts where a one bedroom apartment can cost more than an entire rural mansion to neighborhoods where cautions of drugs would punch through air to assault far more than nostrils. You're in staining the streets like murals and no matter where I went, whenever I brought up the conversation, you know, someone would always blur it out. You're doing this because you have a personal connection. How could someone so sad be so young. Your faces will folding with shock, as if I blinked anxiety on the rising costs of avocado toast or God forbid a be on the math test. You know, I wonder if they think the chicken pox vaccine makes children immune to trauma and exhaustion to apparently human emotions are too complex of sensations to be felt by you. But those questions, those doubts. They didn't phase me because I'd heard them before not from others but from myself see, I'm a first generation Chinese American immigrant I'm from a rural village in the poorest province of China. They're indigenous to our Guizhou mountains stretching back generations or history is old as a slope switch as the smell of rice in rain so how could I feel so empty. How could I feel so deceiving how could I look in the mirror and see my lips stretched wide open yet. I seemingly hear my own bones collapsing. What I know now, and didn't know back then was that I wasn't alone. I'm not alone. You know, I wrote that letter. I read to you at the beginning to remind myself that despite it all what I felt was real, legitimate still me just in the midst of trying. And you probably know this much better now than I ever did before, but she can probably imagine the statistics aren't looking too great. 50% of all lifetime cases of mental illness began by age 14 and 75% by age 24. 20% of youths aged 13 to 18 live with a mental health condition. 37% of students aged 14 and up with a mental health condition drop out of school. That's the highest drop out rate of any disability group. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the US between ages 15 to 34 and it is in fact now the second leading cause of death for young people worldwide. And yet 80% of American youths with severe depression have no or insufficient treatment. You can probably imagine that these statistics are not going to just magically get better right but last 10 years built a different world. Technology and social media were like a revolution. The youths of today face new ideas that old concepts simply can't necessarily accommodate, you know instant social media perfection body distortions. Life makeover, cyber bullying, overstimulation, desensitization, FOMO or fear of missing out. You know I'm sure you've seen these headlines and I'm sure that you've had people in your life or even maybe you yourself believe that this is just kids caring too much about what other people have to say. You know it's that classic adage of well if all your friends did XYZ would you do it too? But the thing is everything is relative to your baseline and in the US that could look like the dinner parties of the 20s and nightclubs of the 80s, the clock chasing of the digital 2010s and now 2020s. You know your life becomes your relevance, your relevance defines your worth or so it seems. It's not that the old triggers have softened, it's that now within two seconds you can look up seriously hurtful information for yourself. I suppose I would know. You know, before I go into my story, I always like to show this picture, because I think it speaks for me the thousand words I don't yet really know how to say. I don't remember much from my childhood that could be categorized as joy. And I don't remember when this picture was taken but I do like to look back on it as a sort of evidence that even when I didn't know it, I did have moments of happiness. And that's astounding to me to think that in the midst of all that pain, there was still always light, even if I didn't see it. So a little bit of a trigger warning for the next slide where I talk a little bit about my background. My verbal presentation will be slightly less triggering than the words on the screen so feel free to not look at the screen for a little bit if you prefer. My story began violently I grew up with scars I learned what they look like what they felt like what they tasted like but most importantly I learned what happens when they don't go away. When I was six years old my family threw me out of the house for the first time into the bottom parking garage of a supermarket complex and I ran wild I mean what is the difference between climbing trees and car hoods, you know digging dirt and trash troops pixie dust and gas plumes. To a six years old I was playing tag with the magic and I swear I catch it for my three wishes. Those gray walls those columns those cars Tanner than me. That was my portal and my punishment you know, self imposed isolation proven discipline make myself small enough to be lost. Take up no space breathe no air shut up slam down that's right what's left but to learn to behave. Eventually, the authorities found me and then I am nine and I'm thinking I would like to dangle my feet over the ocean see we're flying to America, and I am thinking this is the change that I had been begging for the store this asks me if I would like a cookie. My parents spoke no English and still don't and I am louder than my fear so I said the only English words my mother had taught me. I'm sorry. The lady gives me the cookie anyway and to this day that is still the only English phrase my dad really knows how to say anything more than that and we go back to being invisible anyway. Like so many families, we sold everything we own back home, you know we gambled the American dream. The year 2007 and then the recession hits and like so many families we suddenly realized that hey I want the water to work gosh darn it you know I want the bills to stop gosh darn it. I didn't know it was possible for there to always be more to lose. I become best friends with Candice that's the KFC grandma. Candice is my only friend and Candice picks me up from school and my parents are still working their backs raw at the warehouse and I'm getting really, really tired of the cafeteria lady holding up fingers to make sure I understand just how much I still need to pay. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry and then I am 13. I am 13 and I am standing for 10 hours a day at Costco giving a free samples. You know you can't see me now but I'm five feet two and three quarters and when you're my height, the three quarters really makes a difference and I've been about that height since back then so you can imagine me poking my head out from behind the table. And I thought to myself that was going to be my revenge and my christening, you know, survival of the fittest. That's a lot. I offered my youth my energy my commitment as my bribe. I swore I do everything right. I yell too loudly when I'm giving out a free sample in my immigrant English, a white lady disapproves she slashes the free coffee in my face and I want to slingshot myself into the roof. You know, I'm too scared to take a bathroom break the stain runs down my body where my scars blending to skin. And I think I'm probably the sort of modern art that no one wants to bid for but dust. I bit my lip and I felt it in my lungs, you know my breaths were clogged my bones were sore nothing was working and I thought it was all my fault. It took me so long in that moment I thought to believe reality. You know I asked myself why it took me so long to finally realize the truth that everyone around me was telling me. When I was 13 years old, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And though I have a very different outlook on it now at the time it transformed the pain in my life into an inescapable nightmare. Hurt people hurt people. I mean, how true is that right. I know, you know, that mental health concerns can affect anyone anywhere at any age and anytime but I didn't. You know today I can easily say that this is not a moral dilemma. No one chooses mental illness like they choose outfits. The textile merchant from Somalia once told me that mental health should be as normal as the rising and setting sun that we can't afford to wait until it's our sons holding to their heads that go. But it took me a really, really long time to learn that hurt people hurt people. You know, my family like so many others out there grew up with intergenerational trauma. My dad has a long scar etched into his body from a childhood beating that left him alone and bleeding. Not a result of hate but a twisted passed down motion of love. It's not unique to Chinese or Asian or really any cultures and I always emphasize this because all these cultures offered tremendously unique and powerful structures for healing to demonize a culture is to choose ignorance. And I really mean it when I say that I am so so proud of everything that my heritage has taught me. But as an immigrant, as the daughter of a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner stigma has a different taste. And eventually, I grew tired of washing it down with milk. The studies have found that in American clinical practice settings minorities are less likely than white patients to receive treatment that adheres to treatment guidelines. And for the most part it's not really meant to be explicit racism. It's just that there is still a lot of implicit bias in the way that our system works and in the historical built up of it. So we'll take a look at the DSM the diagnostic manual used as the golden standard for determining if someone has a mental illness. As more and more nations around the world are getting into Western psychiatry and psychology. The DSM is being adopted globally as that golden standard. But when it comes to culture bounce syndromes which the DSM defines as symptoms of a mental health condition that are predominantly found within one culture. In this case, minority aka non white culture. Those symptoms are relegated to just the appendix of this huge huge book and in the previous edition, it wasn't even mentioned at all. And so you can imagine that when it's being used for a country like the US that's becoming minority majority in the next few years to the global environment, and it's neglecting the sometimes that people of non white backgrounds can often display. That's going to cause some issues. It's probably not surprising then that ethnic minority and immigrant clients have been found to suspend trust of providers who are ethnically dissimilar from them until they have proven trustworthy. Now agent Americans use mental health services at about one third the rate of white Americans, but we see this rate similarly low for other minority groups as well, whether that be other races or the LGBTQ plus group or whatever else. There's been a lot of households. What you will hear is that mental illness is just the consequence of a past sin. You know it doesn't exist. You're being ungrateful, spoiled, disrespectful, you should drink some herbal tea. The pain is in the body, not the mind and remember mental illness. Well, that's a white people thing. I really tried to believe that. But the thing about emotions is that they are by nature immortal. They learn to undig their own graves. At 14 years old I was diagnosed with anterior uveitis, which is an inflammation of the ice that would pop my eyes blind for days or weeks at a time every time an episode struck. And whenever I asked for help for it, the response was and still is always yes and of course and you're so strong but even now I still get terrified of talking about mental health. You know, afraid that if I say the wrong word, someone will tell me I'm crazy just miss all that I'm saying like admitting mental illness is giving them ammunition and my voice is the target. I'm afraid that if I speak my truth, my story, someone will still tell me I'm romanticizing without bothering to let me finish. Say that I'm only making things worse that I should just shut up because what do I know about mental illness, you know, what do I know about mental illness except that sometimes I get flashbacks frost by calling up my thighs my eyes glazed over my head buried in XL sweaters begging a God I don't know how to believe him to not let me pass him to not let him see me and I alive and I alive and I alive still hurt slipped into my blood the way thunder slips into ears by which I mean less of a slip and more of a tearing or prayer. Loneliness creeps on you like old age. Even in hindsight I still find pieces of my past tossed in between the lines. Sometimes I wonder why if I introduce mental health to the conversation. Some people will take that declaration as confirmation that I don't belong in this nation. Like they're waiting for me to scream do something real normal humans wouldn't. As if mental illness warned me from person to personality human to human disease. Are you kidding me. Years later, I was at a conference and I was telling this story and this Asian American ophthalmologist comes up to me. Do they know what caused it. And I was thinking about all the blood drawn and the hundreds of hours of school missed I think I spent at least half of high school in the hospital. And all the tests that I did and everything just came back. Fine. So no, I had no idea after all the specialists I had seen why the heck I was having this disease. Psycho somatic. She told me a psychosomatic physical manifestations of psychological distress. You know it's like John from Sherlock walking around with a limp from PTSD, even though his leg was technically fine. It's panic attacks burning my lungs even though I've never smoked a day in my life. I was skeptical. You know she was sending me these papers. I was like, yeah, okay, I moved away to college and then for the first time in my life I received consistent mental health care. I finally found a good medication regimen that my body responded to. And as that journey occurred simultaneously. So did my eyes get better. It's been about four years since that journey began. And that was the last time I had my eye episode. Four years ago, compared to half of high school in a hospital. I was starting to think I believed in miracles. You see psychosomatic symptoms hiding the shadows of stigma and many minority cultures, especially one set emphasize the mind body connection have been found to be more likely to experience them. You know, it's like we hide the pain onto our bodies throw a coup. It's like the brain is saying if you won't care for me up here. Let me remind you how I control everything down here. I wish someone had told me back then that this is a possibility. I wish my eye doctors asked me just one more question, you know, not how are you doing but how have you been feeling. Not can't you get new insurance but can't you see you don't owe perfection. Maybe then I wouldn't have had to wait so long for someone to tell me the key you know maybe then I wouldn't need to go through all that to realize that pain is not the synonym for life that I and all of us deserve the air that we breathe. When I was around 1415 ish I attempted suicide for the last time. In the final moment, my little brother was the one who found me. And they say you should find your own strength. Don't rely on anyone else. Sure. But the thing is, sometimes all of our strength is spent on fighting ourselves. And being those moments I chose to borrow someone else's life for a while, you know, standing their glow and let it illuminate the path forward to show me that there is somewhere to go. And for me that person was my little brother. Oh, that's a little doofus. My little brother, who I raised as practically my own child giving our family situation, who I went to all the parent teacher conferences for all the open houses. My little brother was honestly the light of my life. And I thought to myself that even though at that time I didn't care what happened to me. And so no matter how dark my world got I could never drag him down with me. Which meant I needed to heal. Now, how do you heal when you are a fresh teenager trying to navigate the American healthcare system when you have no money and none of your family members speak English except for you and your smaller little brother. Well, turns out it's a little difficult. I ended up turning to writing and I was writing these letters to strangers to no one yet therefore everyone at once. And in these letters I found comfort. You know I was being so kind and empathetic to these people I never even met. So why couldn't I do the same for myself. Didn't I deserve the same for myself. I was beginning to discover the miracle of life, realizing for the first time that I have a voice that I was never alone that writing is humanity distilled into ink. So that was why I found a letter so strangers in my sophomore year of high school I decided that well maybe this thing that I was doing could help other people as well so I made a little student club out of it. And at first I had to bribe my friends with pizza to come to our lunch meetings. And I really thought it was just going to stay like that you know I had no plans for it going beyond my little friend group and our free pizza. But then the pizza money ran out and people kept showing up and then people from nearby schools heard about what we were doing and I think there was this real craving for something that was really youth for youth, especially with that generational gap in technology social media etc. There is this new wave of triggers and fears that we had a lot of trouble talking to older people about. And especially because a lot of them felt like I looked like them and they look like me. And if I can talk about this, maybe they can as well. And so that's how letters and strangers, unbelievably to my wildest imagination, grew to what it is today. You know, of course we do things like anonymous handwritten letter exchanges between students or in campuses or local communities, but we also do things like science based peer education and grassroots policy based advocacy. And so one thing I'll mention here which I'm very proud of is our world's first youth for youth mental health guidebook. It's like this 80,000 word be a myth, a to Z of mental health written entirely by 14 to 21 year olds and reviewed by medical and industry professionals. It really really does deep into the intersectionalities of mental health. So how race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, all these different factors can affect your mental well being. And the best part is that the black and white digital copy is for free to download on our website store letters to strangers.org so I figured I mentioned that since it's a free resource but the point is that today, the digital to us the shorthand for letters for strangers impacts over 35,000 people annually in over 100 branches on six continents. And I always say that if you told me back then that this was going to be a reality today, I would probably slap myself like I want to first slap you because that's kind of rude to joke and prank me with something so incredulous. I don't want to slap myself for even daring to imagine that someone would bother to prank me with something as amazing and unbelievable as this. But I guess that's the point right life gives you so many moments to doubt it, but it also occasionally gives you a chance to prove those doubts wrong. And even though I know it's really, really tough sometimes, if you give it one more day, one more week, one more month, one step at a time, who knows what the next turn will bring. During this time, you know, I was still a teenager trying to figure out life. And one thing that really kind of offended me, okay at the universe is I started to fall in love with photography. I was so upset because I just remember thinking, why the heck would you introduce me to how beautiful and amazing conceptual photography can be right as I lost my eyesight. And the thing is, though, with my ideas easy was kind of weird right because I had these episodes where for days or weeks on and I can't see anything and then when the medications finally start to work. I'll regain my eyesight but then a few weeks later it just messes up again and I'm like, oh, here we go again. The thing is, when you can't see for so long, and then one day it gets better and then another day they are textures and colors and kaleidoscopes magic and ring puddles mirroring pomegranate skies. That could be life. I realized that that could be life. It was beautiful and magical and surreal and I wanted to tell that story as much as I wanted to tell the other side of it. So a few years ago, I created this self portrait conceptual series for Minority Mental Health Month, which is July. And I'm not going to go too deep into the artistic interpretation of everything. As you're probably familiar with on homeworks. This is an exercise best left to the reader, but I'll leave it up here for now. The main thing is I was very lucky. This series ended up going viral with over 2 million views, which is great. Until you realize that the thing people don't remind you about when it comes to virality is the hate comments. And this one really, really stuck with me. What do you know about mental illness? The main concern is seemed that this person and other people who left similar comments had was that I used color. To them, mental illness has to be this purely binary black and white thing. How do you introduce something even remotely different from that. The thing is, those images reflected my story, my truth. And yes, my world had these psychedelic colors. It was nightmarish. It was beautiful. It was glorious. It was hellish. It was the best and worst thing to happen to me all at once. My world was not your black and white. It is my own to lead. And in the midst of exhaustion, medication and epiphanies are internalized. Finally, the best way to learn is through experience. Yes, I am often terrified and overwhelmed. I wonder if I'm weak, if I'm a burden. But no, mental illness can mean battling dragons only to find their nests in our chests, but we learn to live with fire. So where is the weakness in that? How can there be weakness in that? Sometimes I grow too comfortable in the chaos. You know, it's a silly small thing, but it sticks like fish bones in the part of your brain where all the memories go. Disequilibrium in the swelling of my lungs. You know, one, two, three, four, five, six, I grow tired of my own ambitions. It's like walking on eggshells of my own cracking and surprised by the yolk yellow. I can't wash off of the bottom of my feet. But every day, the shells fall off. Little by little, I am still clinging onto what I believe is comfortable. You know that chaos, that confusion, that state of numb. But I also feel myself a stouted wobbly bubble at the edge of the blower foe. And to me, metaphorically, it's like the crack of dawn. And I think I am too sunlit to go back to sleep. Maybe that's too poetic or a little too lofty for you. So let's talk a little bit about concrete actions. Maybe they'll make things feel a little bit more actionable. So you've probably heard about the concept of love languages. But I like to think about pain languages as well. You know, any one of these are of course things that are very normal for any human to experience. But it's when they're used in abnormal amounts or in abnormal combinations for someone that, hey, maybe it's a sign it doesn't hurt to just reach out and ask how they're doing. So the acronym I use is empathizing. E is for eating so eating too little eating too much MS for mind distractions whether that's personal like cleaning a lot or social like suddenly going out to parties all the time. E is for pride. A is for anger. T is for tears as for hurting the self. I is for insomnia slash hypersomnia so sleeping too little sleeping too much. Z is for Zanny. And I will clarify here that it's not Zanny just because it's hard to find a word for Z in an acronym, but also because it's not really just humor or adopting a character or facade for yourself it's like all of them combined. It's the act of trying to become someone who is not going through the things that you are going through right now. And one way that I found people especially of the younger generation tend to exhibit this is through the use of emojis. So I've definitely been in many conversations where someone says something like oh my God I really just want to die right now. And then laughing crying face emoji. And most of the time I know they're just joking right like it's just something that's really annoying and terrible and just like oh. But it's also like a Schrodinger's cat of sorts where it's almost like the emojis there so that if the other person doesn't necessarily have the capacity or desire to have that hard conversation right now. They can take that emoji as a sign that hey this is a joke I'm just going to ignore it, or they can bypass it, act like it's not there and still try to have that deep conversation. And it's really hard to predict what's the right thing to do or what the other person will do. So I always now think that if I start to see this happening a lot, or attached to verbiage that's particularly concerning. Hey, I mean, sure it might just be a joke but it doesn't hurt to ask right. It's more important behavior so being like really reckless. It is for not being present, and then she is for growth productivity so overworking, not just as a distraction but to the point where that productivity becomes the way you value yourself and define yourself worth. So then how do you navigate the journey to heal well, another acronym I like to use is simple. I think the biggest change for me internally happened when I realized that this is not a zero sum game. I spent so much of my time being frustrated and just upset in general because I felt like the people I was talking to like my family members who I wanted to convince them to take my pain seriously. I had a conversation and they didn't seem convinced. I felt like I had felt I had failed, you know, like I lost, but it's not a zero sum game. I'm not in yet to win them over I'm in yet to win myself over. And once I internalize my own worth and my own validity, the more confident I become in self advocacy. The more I exert that confidence the more that the people I'm trying to win over anyway starts to realize that hey, maybe they should just start to take me seriously. So it becomes a win-win situation the second you realize that it's not a win-lose situation. M is for increment, taking things one step at a time. M is for meditate. And I don't just mean sitting in the lotus position and going oh I'm Buddhist so I definitely do that. But what I really mean is carving out that mind space for yourself to let emotions and thoughts come in to view them hold them feel them, and then let them go. And then you have emotions knowing that sometimes you take one step forward and then four steps back. It's okay it's normal you'll get there. L is for listen. And when I say listen, I mean active listening you know not listening so we can think about how to respond to this person how to give them the perfect action plan afterwards etc but really just listening. And so oftentimes we get stuck in trying to help someone else because we feel like we have to solve that issue for them and we just don't know how. But the truth is, our job is not to be the knight in shining armor for other people. And that's a good thing. It means we don't have the burden of slaying the fire breathing dragon. Our role is more to be like a partner in crime of sorts, walking alongside that person as they navigate the road themselves to figure out how they want to and need to heal. The truth is at the end of the day, most of our suggestions or whatever else are probably things that the other person has already thought of. More often than not, what I really want is just to feel listened to. You know there's a mini acronym here, wait, or why am I talking. And I like to think about that a lot when I'm trying to practice active listening for other people. Last but not least is for educate, sort of like what you're doing now taking the time to learn more about mental health, especially because nowadays we're having more conversations like this online on social media. But we have these mentions of buzzwords like mental health mental illness etc. And we don't follow it up with the education that does into those concepts. It's possible that this extra information, this potential misinformation becomes worse than no information at all. So I always say that when we have these conversations is always good to have these educational backgrounds following it. But it wouldn't be me if I gave you all these concrete steps and then just ended it there. See, I like to turn things a little bit poetic a little bit artistic. And so if it's all right with you, I like to end with my grounding philosophies. So work, when you're bringing up pieces your heart stop, there will be time for sacrifices, but now it's not it. Thinking, don't be afraid of daydreaming don't shut up your heart, you know your full of wonders don't hoard them and I don't just mean daydreaming to the point where you start to think and spiral down like this negative train of thought. But I want you to challenge yourself to, instead of asking oh no what if this goes wrong and then that goes wrong to ask yourself, what if it goes right, and then what if that goes right. You know, maybe the best thing that could happen seems like an extreme impossibility but that equal likelihood applies to the worst thing that could happen. So at least recognize that whatever you're daydreaming about if it's on the negative extreme side of things. It's okay to realize that hey maybe that's not something that will actually happen. Maybe something good can happen can come out of life. Explore. If you wonder let's try weekend hiking trips backpacking your world is your own so molded then let it go. Challenge, find the coffee routine or tea or whatever else and then change it. You know subtle sure but you're not a kettle you do more than boil chit chat. Some people will chit chat about you so sing back louder prouder you don't need wings for vibrato just a melody. Finally, body. Sorry, want you to move to the land rumbles and the ocean waves, you dance between the earth and the sky so wave your hands touch the clouds and I know this probably sounds so stupid to you right now. And if we were in person I would be doing like a power pose and you'd be like oh my gosh it's totally making a fool of herself but here's living. Life without adding in a little bit of that impulsivity a little bit of ridiculousness because this moment to well pass. I started with a letter, and I would like to end with one as well. A few years ago letters of strangers collaborated with the screen actors Guild of New York to produce a short film series. And here is one of them where the actress is reading aloud a letter that we've received from someone. I dare you to write down 10 things you love about yourself. Maybe you can't finish it all in a day, maybe you knew just what to write finished in less than 10 minutes. But the thing is we don't give ourselves enough credit. I want you to remember that even when it seems like no one else cares, you should care about yourself. You should care about yourself and I care about you too. That's two people already. The world is less lonely with you here. And for that I thank you. Thank you. Love a stranger. So thank you so much for giving me a little bit of your time today. You can find me online at these handles. I can also put them in the chat if anyone wants to ask for it. Since I'm switching now to the resources slide. So if you have any questions or you need any help here are some resources, including your local campus ones. And there's a survey for active minds you can felt for a chance to win a gift card. I'll leave this slide up for maybe 30 seconds or so so take a screenshot if you need to. And then I will exit out of the screen share so you can go on your break before we head on over to the Q&A. Welcome back Highline family. We will now resume with our Q&A with Diana. If you have any questions, you know, feel free to drop them on the Q&A feature or on the chat as well like I'll keep an eye on the chat. Jenny do you want to ask the first question do you want me to ask the first question. All right, I like this question. What projects are you currently working on book or maybe even a Netflix TV show. This is so funny. Well, thank you to whoever asked me this question. I recently did a video with Shawn Mendes that is out now on the Shawn Mendes Foundation we were talking about mental health. But I am in a YouTube original video. I think it's coming out November 4. I don't know which episode they put me on so one of the episodes, but it's with the Onyx family. So anyway, there's that for the media side of things. But when it comes to you know resources and books and such as I mentioned in the presentation, L2S has our guidebook. And I wrote a lot of that so if you want to hear me talk but through reading it. You can feel free to check that out and L2S always has new resources coming up so. Thank you Diana. So we have another question. What does the disability justice week theme mean to you. Yeah, so I know it's about like liberation and joy right which I think is really wonderful. And I didn't explicitly mention this in my presentation but you know, when I first received my diagnosis like I really thought it was not a death sentence but just something that was both validating and also terrifying at the same time. It's just like because I didn't know how to think of it but I think nowadays, I think of it as like well it's a part of my journey but it is certainly not definitive of me. And in being on this journey I've met people and grew in ways that I never could have otherwise. And of course if I, you know, could live without some of the complications from it that would be ideal, but that doesn't make it make or make me any less valuable. And so I think nowadays I view it as well if I can survive XYZ that's a reminder of my strength. And if I can, and even if it doesn't feel like I'm strong in that moment. I've never overcome these things before and I know I will continue to overcome them is a really humbling feeling so for me that's where I find some moments of joy and feelings of empowerment and liberation. All right, thank you. Our next is what helped you most from time you spent with counselors you saw any words of wisdom we should you should share to our students. I think so I went through several counselors because the first few experiences were not the best to put it simply there was a lot of stereotyping. And I think the absence of that really made a difference, because a lot of people saw me going in as like this Asian American girl, and they just immediately assume that he must be because I have tiger parents and I'm stressed about school. I'm just like, I mean, yeah, I am stressed about school but so is everyone and that's not the reason why I'm here. So I think open mindedness and really letting the person on the other side, tell their story and internalizing it rather than perhaps trying to fit it within an existing framework you have for how you think they should be feeling or behaving and that is the best approach and I'm sure you do that already so this is like preaching to the choir but worth re mentioning. Thank you. So someone is asking, can you please explain why you chose the moon class as the name of your studio. I don't have any poetic reasons for this I just, I loved reading young adult novels and there's this one book called moon glass and he has a really pretty cover. And when I was trying to think of a name for my photography studio I saw and I was like wow it feels so ethereal so that's that. Okay. When you didn't match with your first counselors, what kept you trying again to find the right fit. Well, I didn't try for a while. You know I started a journey in late middle school early high school, and it was very on and off until college. That was when I decided that you know I if I were going to really be serious about healing I need to put my mind to it and so I ended up trying a few different people, but I think that's the thing is that I wish more people told me beforehand that there's different types of therapy. A lot of times we just think about therapy as talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most common and popular type, but it might not be the best fit for you depending on your circumstance or your values and such. And so, knowing that there's different types of therapy and different therapists who will, you know, provide that will be one way of giving yourself more options. Another thing is a lot of therapists nowadays offer free like 15 minute ish consultations. And so having that call with them I know it's a little awkward to be at the end like I actually don't know if I want to schedule a phone appointment but at least giving yourself that chance to get to know them a little bit better before you're putting all the energy that can help to. Okay, so the next question is what advice would you give to professionals who work with youth that are navigating mental health issues. So when it comes to the school context the first thing I emphasize is transparency. The biggest fear I hear from students when they are trying to seek help is that they are afraid of what's going to happen to them. If they tell someone like a teacher or a counselor, the fears and pain they're going through. Sometimes they're not sure if that means they're going to be forced to take mandatory leave, or if they're going to just be sent off to a psychiatric hospital so that the school or whoever else can avoid legal liability in case anything happens etc. And a lot of times these fears are as extreme as they are because they don't have information on what the heck will happen if they talk. So if something happens where you're like okay just so you know where you know that you would need to report to someone else and potentially they would need to follow through with certain policies and such. It's always nice to let them know beforehand like hey just so you know I am a mandated reporter. But if you tell me something that I feel like I need to report to someone else. I don't want you to be afraid because I'm here with you to figure out who is the best person to talk to you about this and where we can get you some helping a way that makes sense for you. Right. How do you think mental health and disability justice connect back to meeting the material conditions of the community. For example addressing house insecurity food insecurity education, public safety, etc. How can institutions or Highline College address these things. That is a big topic. But as you can imagine, and we talked a little bit about in the L2S guidebook there's a lot of different intersections here right and when it comes to even things like food insecurity your gut health and your mental health are very much interlinked and we found so many studies that have shown that people who are born to parents who were malnourished during the time of pregnancy will be more likely to have certain brain development issues that can affect their mental health and things like that so when it comes to the intersectionality is very much there and I think any institution or community recognizing these institutions and emphasizing that when we do community outreach there needs to be a holistic multi-pronged approach right so when it comes to food security rather than just a one time drop off at like a soup kitchen or something to also perhaps think about how we can offer maybe dropping therapist hours for people who go to that soup kitchen regularly or to provide services or hotlines and things like that, or even yourself volunteering for a local warmline, which is a non crisis version of a hotline, and it's usually like run on a county level. Those can be a great way to reach out to people and let people know that they have someone will listen to them, whether or not they're in a crisis and recognizing that that is something that could be used by everyone, but especially if you're already doing outreach to communities that are Thank you. Keep your amazing questions coming Highline family, but we do have another one here. What advice would you give to people who are dealing with the stigma of living with mental illness. This is where that idea of this not being a zero sum game I think really comes into play. Self stigma is a huge thing. And as long as we are not fully accepting ourselves. It's going to be harder for other people to be convinced to accept us as well. And so recognizing that you're in it to win yourself over not to win others over I believe is the first step to knowing that whatever stigma may persist. At the very least, we can't control how other people will react but we can control to a certain extent how our brains will react on our end. So that's something that I will start with and then when it comes to having these conversations with other people. Sometimes it's just hard to jump into like a really intense conversation or at once. So you can ease into it by talking about emotions at large, and just trying to normalize that conversation with that person. And then slowly intensifying it over time to the point where they feel like okay they can talk about even more vulnerable emotions with you without feeling like they have to add in judgment to it. This is kind of like personal question for me. You mentioned earlier like writing and then you like photography. What are other things that you enjoy doing to like take care of yourself. Yeah. I, I really, I've gotten really into like home workouts lately. I am definitely not an exercise person. But I really like the feeling of being like I can finally do a tricep push up, you know. And I know that's not possible for everyone but to the extent that it is possible where it is possible. It's nice to feel like you have at least some element of yourself that you can see improve. Okay we have another question that came into the Q&A. How do we work against the stigma of mental health that an employer might have? How do we advocate for ourselves if our boss's response for a mental health situation is just choose to be happy? Very potent question and you can adapt this to any situation right like a child talking to a parent who just tells them like hey just choose to be happy. I think ultimately, you know, the thing is when it comes to convincing people to take you seriously, if they are giving stigma upon you, then usually that means that they have some preconceived notion right of what mental illness means. But if you're able to point out things from your record like hey you know I've been XYZ before like I've been putting in all these hours, you've seen my progress, you know how hard I work. And so what I want you to know is that when I tell you I'm going through these pains, it's not because I'm not capable or wanting to you know do my best, but that there is a health issue that is preventing me from doing that and you know historically that I am capable of giving more. And so I would I think both of us want to see me back at that better stage. And so that's why I would love for your support in this endeavor because that's going to be a better outcome for both of us in the long run. So if you talk about it in that way I don't like the idea of having to you know, bringing like how much worth you're providing to the company into this because it should be like I think that matters in and out of itself. But when it comes to that in this case you might need to take that approach just to make them realize like hey, even if they are not the best person and don't care about health. At the very least, you would think that they care about giving getting more productivity, which is unfortunate but you know it's what it is. Okay. How do you make sure your creative outlets don't become work. That's definitely a tough one. It depends on to what extent it did you define working your life. So for some people I know if you are like selling a few of your creations on Etsy, like every month it's not really feeling like work for you then that's great. So when you test out these different quantities and like amounts of just quantities in general of things that you're doing. If you feel yourself starting to become aversive to it, or just no longer enjoying it then you know take a signal from your body and realize that hey I think it's becoming work for me. And then if that's the case and take a step back right because at the end of the day sounds like you don't want it to become work so if it feels like work then you, and you have the capability of distancing from it for a while then go for it. So we have another one. If you could go back in time Diana and see yourself at 13 or 14 years old. What is something you would tell your young self, knowing all that you now know about life. Well one thing I would not tell myself is the whole. Oh, just wait it out it'll get better because I think I would just want to slap myself I told myself that. And when you're in that amount of pain you can't really imagine a better future but what I would do I think it's rather than saying anything I would just hug myself. And that's it. Yeah, I wouldn't say anything. Um, the theme for this week is disability joy a mindset of an apologetic, an apologetic liberation. So like what gives you joy right now. So, some of the family members who were the source of a lot of my pain growing up. After I went on this advocacy journey and I really started to internalize my own worth. Recently they have been telling me that they are trying to seek therapy. And that made me so happy because that was like an unimaginable response just a few years ago. And of course not everyone is going to responding that way but I think it really just shows that when you become confident in the life that you're living with or without disability, recognizing that you still have forth no matter what, like living like you believe that you have that worth. Ultimately, some people, at least will respond to realize that they themselves should question the stigma they were holding previously. I think that we are there are no more questions. Thank you community for asking your amazing questions and Diana, we just wanted to thank you so much for joining us today this was such an amazing powerful presentation so just thank you so much for sharing with our Highline family. Thank you for having me. I hope you are all doing well out there north of me.