Students narrate mental health stories at All of Us event
By Melody Teng
April 9, 2015 12:20 p.m.
This article was updated on April 15 at 5:57 p.m.
Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi walked up to the stage, notes in hand, as one of six students ready to tell their stories.
Al-Mazeedi, a fourth-year violin and vocal performance and political science student, was one of six UCLA students who shared their personal experiences with mental illness at HEADtalks, an event hosted by All of Us: A Campaign to Rethink Mental Health, Tuesday in De Neve Plaza Room B.
All of Us is an Undergraduate Students Association Council-wide campaign started in September in collaboration between the Student Wellness Commission and the USAC Office of the President.
“I want to present a realistic framework of how to sustain mental well being in a university background,” Al-Mazeedi said.
Al-Mazeedi said she was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in June 2012 and sought help from a therapist who helped her with her recovery process.
“My therapist saved my life,” Al-Mazeedi said.
When Al-Mazeedi first realized she was depressed and traumatized, she said she did not feel she had access to adequate resources. On Tuesday, she pointed students at the event to on-campus resources available to those dealing with mental illness.
At home, Al-Mazeedi said she felt her parents did not understand how she felt and did not accept her mental illness. Her father did not understand she needed professional help or medication and her mother would conflate her emotions with weakness, she said. She added that she thinks this may have been because of her parents’ cultural backgrounds, and she wanted to share her story to help other students whose families may also consider mental illness a taboo.
Al-Mazeedi and another speaker, Katie Patel, are both members of the group Active Minds, a committee within the Student Wellness Commission.
Patel, a third-year psychobiology student, said she became depressed and started to have suicidal thoughts during college and that she was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.
She said she is learning to live with her bipolar disorder, and that she joined Active Minds because she wants others to have a better understanding of mental illness to combat the stigma surrounding it.
Alex Prince, a second-year neuroscience student and another speaker at the event, said he also suffered from depression.
Prince said that he was often bullied during elementary school and middle school, and the bullying led him to develop depression, which he realized when he was in the eight grade.
Prince said he often kept his depression to himself as he thought his peers and others around him would not understand what he was going through.
He said there is a lack of dialogue in the society about mental illness and that this unwillingness to talk was once destructive to him. It is why, he said, he is trying to spread awareness about mental health issues, including at HEADtalks.
“If we could just get them talking, then mental illness would be accepted by society,” Prince said.
