Make Mental Health a Priority | Andrea Utiashvili | TEDxYouth@TbilisiGreenSchool
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-x1AfSf6uY Video ID: w-x1AfSf6uY ============================================================ Transcriber: Nguyên Nguyễn Hồng Phúc Reviewer: Walaa Mohammed Hi. Hello, everyone. So I want to start this TED talk with my personal experience. A year and a half ago, just as the school was starting， my parents noticed that I was breathing weird. My mom, a helfrich that she took me to the hospital where I went through every existent lung and heart checkup. After lots of worrying, and trust me, lots of tests, we found out that the only reason causing my hyperventilation was extreme stress associated with starting off the new school year. Unreasonably high expectations, the necessity to get perfect marks in every subject, all consuming fear of disappointing loved ones and a whole new wave of overwhelming information had a powerfully negative effect on my mental health and with it every aspect of my life. Even now, after a long and hard fight with my anxieties as I'm standing here right now, half of my brain is endlessly worrying about all the tests I have to write next week and another half about how much you will like this speech. Well, unfortunately, my feelings and I aren’t especially unique phenomenon. The problems I have been struggling with all my life are very common in children nowadays. I’m sure at least half of the kids sitting right here in the audience have experienced uncomfortable feelings, I don’t know, sleepless nights, because of the stresses associated with school. And same is true not just for this audience, but rather for a big percentage of students all around the world. Well, naturally, a moderate amount of stress can be beneficial to us. It can motivate us and help us to concentrate on ourselves. A bigger amount of anxiety children are obligated to face right now can be nothing but harmful to them. Firstly, tense children are much more likely to develop anxiety and depression or other mental illnesses which drastically reduce their happiness, overall well-being and along with the chances of success. Secondly, burned out, torn out students are much more vulnerable than patient of substance abuse. Thirdly, stress can deter students’ ability to fully showcase their abilities and utilize their potential. Finally, stress can demotivate the students. It can create a resentful, hateful feeling towards school, that causes the child to drop out or lose any kind of interest in learning. I cannot stress enough how many times I have thought about stopping learning intensely after a long, hard day or before a stressful exam filled week. As you can see, education related stress is an extremely important problem, solving which is essential for ensuring happiness and well-being of children all around the world. And just talking about it is not enough. We need to fight against stress immediately because the more time we waste, the more children will be scarred and damaged. I think our plan should consist of two main steps. First step is understanding that students’ happiness is the main priority. All parts of the education system - schools, parents, children, must realize that no kind of education will be beneficial to a child if getting it will mean facing more stress than they are capable of handling. We must remember that it doesn’t matter how good a teaching plan is if it doesn’t ensure that the student is happy. Second step is identifying and directly addressing the factors which stressed children out. I’ve noticed that many kids try to battle education related stress by taking antidepressants, starting therapy, talking about their mental health, openly doing yoga. And while these ways can be extremely beneficial and help lots of children all around the world, in my opinion, fighting this disease like so is similar to battling the symptoms, not the disease itself while treating a patient. I think to be most productive, qualifications system needs to be concentrated on the most important and most damaging factors causing children’s stress. From my own experience, the two factors that stress children out are an immense and unreasonable amount of information we have to learn while studying and the immense pressure from our parents or the whole society to be perfect. Overcoming these obstacles requires an active engagement from parents, schools and children themselves. Educational facilities must reduce the amount of information we need to learn the amount of data we need to memorise in order to be considered good students, with the chances of getting in to a good university. Because in the current situation to satisfy sports needs, students have to sacrifice everything else. Children today basically stand, I guess, a dilemma. They either have a stress conjunctive life with zero social activity and learn, or they just forget about most subjects at school. Obviously, none of those options are good and they constitute a massive problem which can be solved just by reducing the amount of work children have to do. Children and their parents, on the other hand, must realise that in the current situation, it is unreasonable to ask a student to be perfect. We all make mistakes, we all fail sometimes, and prohibiting it, making it unheard of is simply unreasonable. To sum it up, children today are facing much more stress that they are capable of handle, which has a negative effect on basically every aspect of their lives. Therefore, fighting this problem is extremely urgent. In my opinion, completing our mission would be easy and feasible if you realise two main things. Firstly, we must understand the full gravity of this problem and how extremely important it is to solve it. We must realise that nothing is worth our happiness. Secondly, we must internalise it for us to overcome this barrier. We need to focus on the main, most damaging problems which causes this quoted core disease. So I guess if we could just take away two sentences from this whole speech, I would want those to be firstly, “make happiness a priority”, and secondly, “fight the disease, not the symptoms”. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)