Off the top of my head, I can name more people than fingers on my hand who struggle with mental illness. The funny thing is, I learned about mental illness years before I was ever taught about it, and even then all I learned was the bare minimum. The only thing I ever learned was that if I noticed my friend was struggling, I should call a hotline or inform an adult. No one ever told me what to do when my friends came to me asking for help and advice because they couldn’t talk to their therapist. Nothing ever prepared me for my friends not eating and I was never told what to do if they were already getting help. I was only ever told what to do if no one knew. 

 I first learned about depression and eating disorders in middle school, when the worst part was that so many people around me were struggling with these disorders that I knew nothing about. It is incredibly discouraging to see so many people struggling and not be able to do anything because you don’t know enough. In KSD, mental illness is not taught until health class in high school (while they do talk about it a bit in middle school it is not covered as extensively as in the high school health class), an elective that some students don’t even take until senior year. In a survey given out to KHS students, 157/288 responded when they are a friend had been diagnosed and of that number 64/157 explained that they or a friend had been diagnosed before high school, while the next highest response was sophomore year. We should be teaching kids about mental health before they have to deal with it, so that when they do discover mental health they know what to do and that whatever is going on inside their head has a name and isn’t just “teen angst.”