The deliberation I attended was one that was about raising mental health awareness in schools. As a psychology major, this just caught my eye. Mental health is and has been an ongoing issue in the United States for a long time now. I was interested to see how they would pull together this deliberation with the fact that mental health in high schools is such a wide and broad topic.
To start off the deliberation, the group started off with some statistics and a story to grab the attention of the audience. They said one in five students will and do suffer from a mental health issue. The story that they told was about a girl that was in high school and wanted to go to some type of counseling for the academic stress that she was facing. The guidance counselor told her that according to the school rules, this was only for people that had a death in the family. I feel this information opened up the room and made everyone realize how big of an issue this is. This is prioritizing the key values at stake, one of Gastil’s criteria. They identifies the problem in a way that would make the audience sit back and reflect on their own opinions and values upon the subject. They also created a solid information base based on experiences and facts.
This deliberation was split up into portions. The first portion of this was the awareness portion. They talked about how it is important for students to be aware of the resources that they have in the schools regarding mental health. They suggested that all schools should have assemblies and individual conversations with students more often to ensure that the students are well aware of the resources and the guidance that is given to them throughout the school year. During the questions part of the deliberation, there was some controversy as some people asked why students could not reach out first. Students replied with not all students are willing to reach out and communicate with their counselors as they might be reserved. This falls into the category of considering other’s ideas, another one of Gastil’s criteria. It could also tie into respecting other participants and ensuring mutual comprehension which are two more criteria.
The next portion was prevention. They pitched that a great way to prevent mental health in schools is to reduce the amount of work load that students are given. They stressed that students who work outside jobs, play sports or any other extracurricular activities can be faced with plenty stress trying to balance everything. In the audience, students agreed with this as they said that having multiple exams in one day could cause plenty of stress on them.
The last portion of the deliberation was about mental treatments. The group started off with statistics of how many people know about mental health treatments and how many people actually get them. This eventually turned into the audience speaking and sharing different perspectives and experiences about mental health. This conversation eventually led to the discussion of the stigma surrounding mental health and why some people are hesitant to open up about mental health. Since everyone in the room had a chance to speak, this follows adequately distributing the speaking, another one of Gastil’s criteria.
Overall, I think it was an interesting deliberation. It was cool to see all of the different views from teachers, faculty, and students on this topic. Although, I was confused as to why they did mental health in high schools, but not in college. I think that topic would have been something they can related to more.