Student Presidential Persona

Welcome back to my blog. The class that I have been taking for the last couple of weeks is called the Art of Rhetoric in the Humanities class. In this first unit we have discussed the appeals, ethos, logos, and pathos, and devices of rhetoric and how people use them in speeches and debates. We were able to sit down with Julia Kline, a spokesperson for ILVote. She talked about her experience with registering people to vote and how she is able to convince people through oratory skills. We also studied the rhetorical situation which includes a speaker, audience, purpose, context, occasion, and genre. For this Action Project, we have been asked to personify a candidate for GCE’s student government. I decided that I wanted to talk about mental health from my own perspective. This allowed me to share my own experience and bring up a topic I want my school to act on. I hope you enjoy reading and watching this project.






Script:


I would like to advocate more for mental health. Mental health is something that is hugely important to me and affects everybody. It is something that people can struggle with, or they can thrive in, or they can be a weird middle ground. I just want to say that it is ok to be wherever you are. I want to help be a resource for those who either want to know more about it, or help themselves, and just encourage you to have a better understanding of it. Mental health is something that I have struggled with myself, and I know so many people who struggled with this. I have gone to therapy and taken medication, and occasionally write out how I feel. These are things that have helped me extensively, especially over quarantine and things were unstable. I felt like my life was all over the place. While reading an article from the Wall Street Journal, there was a statistic that said out of 977 parents, almost half of them noticed a difference in their child's mental state.

Therapy especially has helped me so much. But I also want to say that therapy, medication, and other things like journaling do not work for everybody and if these do not work for you, that's ok and also these things can be expensive.


At this school, we have many resources related to learning about mental health but I’ve noticed that at this school, we don’t talk about this topic too often. I remember over quarantine Kiley was a big advocate for this. And that was great but this kind of thing should not all be on the shoulders of one person. We as a student body and faculty should talk more about this.


We have our student counselor, Kiley, who I have found to be very helpful. Not everybody likes to talk to other people about this kind of thing, and that is understandable and I would just like to say that there are other things you can do to help with your mental health, like journaling and going on walks, and meditating. These things can seem to be unrelated to your mental health and mental state but they can be crucial in this process. My father, a couple of years ago, was struggling with his mental health, and he started running and has been running ever since and has gotten really good at it. It helps him process the things going on in his life, it also gives him a space away from people and is something he can do for himself. I have been able to see a big difference in his mental state. This is also something that has been scientifically proven to be helpful. I know there are a bunch of articles and research papers related to this that I'll send around.







Works Cited:




Peterson, Andrea. “Kids Head Back to School—and Bring Covid-19’s Mental-Health Scars With Them.” The Wall Street Journal, 30 August 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-pandemic-mental-health-schools-depression-anxiety-11630333260. Accessed 30 September 2021.




Sharma, Ashish, et al. “Exercise for Mental Health.” US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, NCBI, 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470658/. Accessed 30 September 2021.