Dear Future President,

I am a student in high school and I would like to try and persuade you to fix the mental health stigma. Mental Health is a very serious topic but the stigma around it is that you don’t want to talk about it yet by addressing this issue, you could save a life.

To start off, we have what the stigma is. People don’t talk about how they feel because of this stigma. The air around depression and suicide is very thin and most people don’t want to talk about it. People are scared to come forward with their stories because they fear they will be seen as weak and maybe people will judge them. I have had personal experiences with friends being too scared to come forward and it is very hard to see someone go through this. Except, when they do start talking about it, it seems to help. This problem is very real and if we break this we can understand each other better.

Furthermore, talking about this stigma could save a life. By talking about the issue you could find someone who needs help through a mental illness yet diagnosed. By giving more information to kids in schools we can change this attitude and make it easier for people to come forward and open up about what they are feeling. One may argue against this by saying that talking about it makes it worse. But I beg to differ, by just talking about it won’t push someone over the edge. In fact, just from personal experiences being a listener to someone helps them a lot. As well as giving them advice, by listening to what they are going through you can help them through it. They might even open your eyes to what the real world is like.

It’s important that we change this stigma and get people talking. By following this problem and talking about it you could save a life. If we don’t fix our thoughts on mental illness we are going to keep having people commit suicide because they feel they can’t talk to anyone. We need to change this, we need to eliminate this stigma and make people comfortable with coming forward and talking about their experiences. If you could fix this issue then you might be a fairly good president.

Sincerely,

A concerned student