Week 0 Blog: Welcome to my project!

Hey, you amazing academics! 

My name is Shreyas, and I want to officially welcome you to my senior project blogs! Over the next few months, I will be giving you guys a behind-the-scenes look at my project as we travel through all the ups (and downs) together. But before I can tell you all about my project and what I hope to accomplish, let me tell you guys a little bit about myself and why this project matters to me. 

In middle school, as many kids do, I went through a period of mental health struggle unlike anything I have ever experienced before or since. In that struggle, I not only felt completely isolated, but I also felt wholly underprepared to navigate my mental health and had to figure out many things for myself. I vividly remember sitting in my bed searching up terms like “depression” and “anxiety”, and although these are now terms I am incredibly familiar with, I sometimes forget that I learned about them through Psych2Go videos and random Reddit forums. 

Although I have grown from that experience and have since figured out how to navigate my mental health and practice self-care, I still remember feeling completely and utterly lost in a world filled with big terms where neither my peers nor I knew what mental health really even was. That experience showed me the value in having school-based mental health education, because even if it really was just one assembly, feeling heard and understanding what was happening to my peers or me could’ve been all we needed. 

Now that the motivation behind my project is clear, let’s take a bit to talk about what I’ll actually be doing. In this project, I will (hopefully) be determining the effectiveness of one-time mental health assemblies in raising awareness about mental health amongst middle schoolers. To do this, I will first have to split the participants I randomly select into control and experimental groups, where the experimental group will receive the assembly and the control group will receive no additional instruction. Then, I will have both groups complete a pre-assembly survey (1 week before the assembly takes place) and a post-assembly survey (1-week after the assembly takes place). By comparing differences in growth between the two groups, I will be able to see whether there is a statistically significant impact that is created because of the assembly. 

I will be conducting this project under the guidance of Dr. Hari Nair, a licensed child and adolescent psychiatrist and an avid proponent of mental health awareness amongst youth and South Asian communities. Through this project, I hope to find an easily and readily implementable way for schools to work to counter the youth mental health crisis. This project means a lot to me, both academically (as it is my first research project) and personally, and I can’t wait to bring you guys along! Stay tuned for more blog posts, you beautiful braniacs, and I’ll catch you on the flip side.