This year is officially the Year of Mental Health, according to Governor Evers.
On Monday, he visited Merrill High School to meet with student leaders and mental health advocates.
Students and the governor met for a round-table discussion after student presentations.
This story does talk about suicide.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call the hotline at 988.
Raise Your Voice is the most popular student organization at Merrill High School.
There are 108 members, so that means 1 out of every 8 students is involved.
It was established in 2016 to bridge the gap in youth mental health resources and destigmatize mental health issues in the Northwoods after a local family lost their child to depression.
The group facilitates “Green Bandana Project” training, a program to prevent suicide by encouraging seeking help and by making resources clearly available.
At Merrill High, Mondays are now dubbed “Mental Health Mondays”.
This is Reggie Lahti, President of the Merrill High School Raise Your Voice.
“It's like on Mondays, we have our mental health merchandise, you can't walk through the hall to a class without seeing like three people with a sweatshirt on. And it's just so cool. You see students uplifting each other like never before,” she said.
Now, the club has grown beyond just Merrill- there are six other high school chapters and even a middle school group.
Jalie Severt is a student at Merrill High and secretary of the Merrill Raise Your Voice club.
“One of the big things is that most students don't feel that they can talk to adults. And the majority of students will talk to a peer about mental health issues. So that's kind of the goal of this, to let other students know how to help their peers out,” she explained.
This is Danica Spets, President of Raise Your Voice at DC Everest Junior High School, speaking to Evers.
“I also feel like there are a lot of misconceptions, that if we start talking and advocating about mental health at young ages, that young children are going to suffer with their mental health more because we push these ideas, but I think it would help a lot to let kids know that they can reach out and that they're not alone,” she explained.
Governor Evers noted students’ repeated emphasis on the need for earlier support and intervention for young people’s mental health.
He referenced a $15 million grant to the “Get Kids Ahead Initiative” his office awarded in April.
It doubled funding for the initiative, which provides mental healthcare in schools, hires and supports mental health navigators, and more.
“To have a student group that is [as] active as some of the ones that we saw today, they are going to share that. And that's going to grow for forever, until we have this issue addressed.” said Evers.
Evers said he was impressed by the sheer number of students involved in Raise Your Voice.
Most of the student leaders were young girls.
This is a student’s response when Evers pointed out this gender disparity.
“I think that there's a stigma that men or boys can't show vulnerability and have those rough patches. And I think that as a club, we're working towards breaking that,” responded a student leader in Raise Your Voice.
Leila Heuser is President of Raise Your Voice at Wausau West.
She explained that they discuss these types of disparities often- in their last member meeting, they talked about disparities in mental healthcare access between racial groups.
Governor Evers said he was impressed by the mass amounts of student involvement in the movement.
“It's great to have kids worried about this issue and focusing on it. But we also need more professionals in the system, and that is a really crying, crying out for help,” he said.
Evers said that mental healthcare has been long ignored and called student advocates ‘extraordinary’.
