Mental health awareness has become something of a nationwide phenomenon where people everywhere have done their best to de-stigmatize mental health and mental illnesses. This is all in order to help those suffering from mental illnesses feel more comfortable and less afraid to talk about their mental health and to make them feel less alone in their struggles.

Unfortunately, the efforts of this de-stigmatization have turned on its head. The efforts to make people more aware of mental health have turned into something insincere and superficial where people make jokes about mental illnesses and disregard mental health’s importance, just because of how ‘normal’ it seems to them now.

In Canyon Ridge High School a lot of the student body doesn’t take much of any of the mental health awareness activities seriously. Every Thursday we have a ‘Boot Check’ day where students and teachers in their advisory classes are supposed to check on each other and how they’re doing, but almost no one does it, and if they do, it’s rarely ever seriously.

The mental health awareness de-stigmatization has turned superficial, and this is a problem almost as bad as the stigma from before. This needs to change, mental health needs to be seen as something less trivial, and more as something that affects millions of people worldwide. All of this is to say that mental health awareness is still a serious issue, but it is no longer being viewed as such.