 So this last week, I had the honor and the pleasure of being invited down to one of the local high schools here in Las Vegas to talk about mental health. They invited me as somebody who has my own experience dealing with mental health issues, working in the field of mental health, doing psychoeducational groups, and as an advocate of mental health. So in this video, I want to talk about the questions that these teens asked me, which might be able to help some of you as well. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. So I do things like psychoeducation, mental health advocacy, all that kind of stuff. So if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. All right. So yeah, a local high school here. I was super, super, super excited to hear not only where they actually doing a mental health project, but they invited me down to speak to them. So I went down two days this week to talk to two different classes. They're part of the speech and debate team. So that's kind of cool in and of itself, but they had some different categories that they wanted to talk about when it comes to mental health. So I went down there and these kids had some amazing questions and they did their research and all that. But they were really engaged with me too. Like they weren't just like, I was in high school just like, oh, I got to do this project. They were like in it. So I love that because it means that teenagers, not all teenagers, but at least these ones in these two classes, they really do care about mental health. And that's so important because as I'll discuss with some of the topics that they gave me, that was one of my issues growing up is that mental health just wasn't talked about it wasn't taught or anything like that. All right. One of the first categories that they talked to me about was how to get help. All right. So they asked me how to get help. And the thing is it depends on the age group. Okay. So like for them at their age or if you're a teenager watching this, 18, younger, anything like that, or even if you're still living with your parents, like the first step is to talk to an adult, right? Your parents, a school counselor or a teacher. Typically I recommend starting off with the parents, but from my experience and a lot of people who have talked to me, you know, in the treatment center I was working out, I, you know, we had people as young as 18, 19 years old. And a lot of people are afraid to talk to their parents. One of the biggest reasons that I found just from my experience is a lot of kids don't want to worry their parents, right? They know that their parents have their own stresses and things like that. Like I'm a father and I'm letting you know, no matter what's going on in my life, I would much rather my, my kid talk to me no matter what's happening in my life. Like I don't care if the apocalypse is happening. If you are dealing with something, come talk to me. But I get it. Some kids are not comfortable with that. So then that's where I recommend talking to a school counselor. But even if you don't talk to a school counselor, like find a trusted teacher. Find a teacher who you like and trust and talk to them, all right? Like you have to talk to an adult like, you know, I was pretty brutally honest with these kids. When I was a teen and I know a lot of teens, like it's easy to make really dumb decisions just getting only getting feedback from your peers. Like it's important to have peer support, but it's important to find somebody who has life experience and resources and things like that. Now, how to get help as an adult. I'm going to be doing some videos now that, you know, we're kind of like in that political time of the United States. And I know some of you aren't going to like it, but my first video is going to be about political anxiety. So hopefully it can help you out with that. But in all honesty, like a lot of people don't have the resources to get mental health help, right? So in a perfect scenario, how to get help, talk to your doctor, right? Talk to friends, like talk to your insurance company. See if they can recommend a therapist and things like that. But there are many, many people where even with insurance, even with health insurance, therapy can still be expensive. You see what I mean? So that is an issue that we all really need to care about. All right. So the next topic was teaching common mental illnesses. So one of the reasons that, you know, I started this channel or even taught my clients about this during the psycho educational groups and just kind of educated them based on my knowledge and education and experience is because, you know, I know it's different in different parts of the country, but I know for me in here in Las Vegas, they don't teach you about mental health. Okay. So something I would do with my groups is I would ask them, I would say, how many of you had a physical education class and like every hand would go up, right? And like, this is for you too. How many of you had a physical education class? And then I would say, put your hands down. I'd be like, okay, how many of you were taught about common mental illnesses, right? How many of you in your physical education classes were taught about signs of depression, signs of anxiety, signs of trauma, how to deal with grief and loss, all these things, all these things that happen in life. And maybe if I was lucky, maybe one or two hands went up, but the treatment center I was working at, we had clients from all over the country, like this is an issue. So what do we do at that point? What do we do? If schools are not teaching our, you know, our youth about mental health, what do we do, right? We have to come together. We have to, you know, as parents, something that I do with my son, we've been talking about mental health eats 10 now. I've been talking to him about it since he was like five. You know what I mean? So it's a huge responsibility of the parents, but also like get involved with your community. There's a ton of stuff like in a couple of weeks here. We're going to be doing this annual walk for suicide prevention, you know, my son always comes and things like that, like get involved with your community. Like if our schools are not teaching it, like we need to come together and teach it. Okay. So the next one was communication to prevent conflict. And like just so you know, like I got like multiple questions for each of these categories, but I kind of wanted to hone in on some of the most common ones or popular ones. Now this question, I remember because some of these kids, like while they were asking for their project, some of them were asking because of their personal experience as well. And this young lady asked me, she was asking me about if you know somebody has a mental illness and like, you know, she said bipolar disorder. So I don't know if it's somebody in her life who has bipolar, but she's like, when they're like yelling at you and screaming at you, like, how do you, you know, how do you be nice about that? Because they're struggling with a mental health issue. And I'm like, time out, time out. All right. So while it is very, very, very important to be empathetic to people struggling with mental illnesses, none of us, not me, not you, not anybody is meant to be somebody's punching bag. Okay. That is one of the reasons why I talk about on this channel rule number one is don't be a dick. Okay. Like having a mental health issue and I was talking about this to an entire classroom of kids and they were all just like honed in because like it's important to understand just because somebody has a mental illness doesn't mean they're allowed to treat you like garbage. Okay. Like we do not have to accept somebody walking all over us. Like one of the most important things is for us to set up boundaries. Like there was a way to do this from my experience and be empathetic, right? Like I I've worked in a treatment center. It was a dual diagnosis treatment center. So you have people angry that they had to get sober and people also dealing with mental health issues. Some of them refuse to take their medications and things like that, but they would snap on me. Right. I'd be like, Hey, I know you're going through stuff right now, but I'm out of here. I'm bouncing like we do not have to sit here and take any type of verbal abuse. And that that to me and one of the questions coming up is about the stigma. That's one of the things that perpetuates the stigma in my opinion, right? Is people who weaponize their mental illness, right? They they lash out. They're they're a jerk to you. They walk all over you. They do these things and say, oh, that's just my mental illness. Like that is not a valid excuse in my opinion. Like for me personally, my experience like if I don't have my anxiety under control, I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. I could be a real jerk to the people in my life. That is not an excuse. You know what I mean? It is my responsibility to take care of those things and try to manage it for the sake of the people in my life. Like this involves everybody. Okay. The person struggling with mental health issues as well as the loved ones. So what I taught to the class was like learn to set up healthy boundaries, learn to have an exit plan, right? Like go to a friend's house or something like that. If you have a parent who is struggling with these things, but you do not have to stand there and just have somebody screaming in your face just because they have their own mental health issues. When they come back down, if there's a way that you can help or provide them with resources, go for it, but you are not meant to be the person that they lash out on. Okay. So the next one was like coping strategies and prevention. Okay. So something that I've talked about on this channel that I talked to them to is, you know, and this kind of ties in with time management. A lot of them asked me about time management, you know, because of stress and, you know, high school and things like that. We have to be proactive about our mental health. Like a lot of you know, I've just been, I've been going through a lot of stuff lately, right? A lot of stuff and as bad as it was, it would have been so much worse had I not been proactive about my mental health because the analogy I always give is you don't practice a fire drill only when a fire is happening, right? You practice fire drills so that way when a fire happens, you know what to do. Okay. So this is what I was teaching. I'm like, you need to make time to focus on your mental health and some of the coping strategies that are just very easy, very common. Like soon I'm going to be doing a review of three journaling apps like mood journals on on your cell phone, but like journal every day, right? Meditate every day, exercise every day. Talk to a support group every day. Be proactive because that way it gets ingrained in you. So that way when stuff goes down, you know to pick up the phone or you know to journal, you know to go exercise it, you know to meditate, you know what I mean? Don't only do these things when things are going terrible. All right. So when it comes to time management, like five to 10 minutes a day, like five to 10 minutes a day for your mental health and that goes back to, you know, schools not really teaching about mental health and strategies and everything like that. Like we need to take it into our own responsibility. You know what I mean? Like we need to teach our kids like, Hey, make this part of your daily routine routine. Do this, do that, right? Because we need to be doing something like five to 10 minutes a day. You can find the time. If you're a teenager, you know, quit scrolling through social media. Watch one less, you know, YouTube video, you know what I mean? Like talk on the phone a little bit less. Don't text, you know, for 10 minutes and just do something proactive for your mental health, but this for all the adults out there as well. All right. So the last thing that they asked me about is breaking the stigma, right? And they were talking to me about how they feel as though you're not allowed to talk about mental health. And I was like, do I know about that? Right? And you know, there was a few questions about this and they're like, Why do you think we can't talk about mental health? And here's the thing. Here's what I've noticed from my personal experience, especially recently, is that people are trying to have a monopoly on mental health, right? And people are trying to gatekeep mental health, right? They're trying to say who can and who cannot talk about mental health. And that's a major issue, right? Like think about it. Like just just put this in perspective. I'm sitting in a room of teenagers who are afraid to talk about mental health and then they're seeing other people saying you are not allowed to talk about mental health. Like we need more people talking about mental health, not less. You know, like it is very difficult. Like it is hard for people like for me growing up. Mental health is not something that we talked about, right? I love my dad to death, but he was a type of father who told me to walk it off, right? I'm sad. Walk it off. You went through a breakup. Walk it off. Oh, you're anxious. Walk it off, right? Like we did not talk about emotions in my family, you know, so it was all bottled up and everything like that. So I never developed coping skills. We need to teach people that it is okay to talk about mental health and especially on a public platform. We need to do these things to show people. Hey, it's okay to talk about this stuff, right? And personally, I feel and started to stand up on the soapbox real quick. Like I get it. I've made some missteps, which I'm working on and things like that. But what what all of this conversation has done is it's it's brought us, you know, 10 steps back in my opinion, because now a ton of people are definitely afraid to talk about mental health. And that's one of the reasons why I'm never going to give up. I'm going to keep doing my thing. You know, some people are going to disagree with me and that's okay. Right. But we need more people talking about mental health, not less. So what I encourage these kids to do like, you know, you don't have to make a YouTube channel or whatever, but talk to each other about it, like go and like ask people how they're doing and let them know that it's okay to talk about this stuff. Like I was a triathlete in high school. You know, John Chris, whatever, like it was not okay for me to talk about mental health. Like men, women alike. Like we all just need to be having this conversation more often. Like my goal, my mission in life is to make this a normalized conversation. I want people to talk about mental health as normally as they talk about physical health. And what I was telling these kids is, you know, mental health and physical health should be at the same level. But if you want to be honest, in my opinion, mental health should be more important than physical health. Right. Physical health is very important. That's why I'm trying to lose the weight. But here's the thing. Like the, the, the hottest, sexiest people on earth, the buffest people on earth can be absolutely miserable. Okay. Like you get your mental health under control and the rest is just, you know, a cakewalk. All right. But anyways, yeah, these kids had some amazing questions and like, I highly recommend all of you out there. If you, if you have experience, if you have something to offer, like, donate some of your time to your community to local high schools, you know, all of you probably know a teacher. Just say, yo, I have this day off. Is there some time I can come down and maybe talk about mental health and things like that. Like, it is just so important because like I said, you know, if, you know, the school system isn't allocating classes to mental health. I know there's like, let me just say this real quick. Psychology classes are not mental health classes. All right. Those are not there. Like, that's teaching you about the human mind and everything like that. I'm talking about the classes dedicated to teaching about like prevention and coping skills and all that. But get involved in your community. See if there's some time that you can donate. Go to local events thrown on by other organizations. All of you in major cities, not even huge cities. Like, I guarantee there are organizations that take volunteers and all of that. Like, for example, here in Las Vegas, we have multiple organizations. We have one at the college, UNLV. We actually just opened up the first public recovery high school. They are always looking for volunteers. Like I mentioned, there's a walk for suicide prevention happening here in Las Vegas. We do a recovery rally every September. There's so much stuff here in Las Vegas. So go out see what's happening in your city and get involved. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You are all amazing and do not forget the Patreon Q&A for March is up. So go ask your questions and if you would like to get involved in the Patreon Q&A, click or tap right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.