Health, and How it’s Taking Over at UWYV

There has been a huge increase in health-related Venture Teams over the past year at United Way Youth Venture, and there is really no surprise why. Health is all around us, it’s a part of life. This year, many Venturers focused on mental health, and the stigma that surrounds it. For teams like Mental Health Helpers and Love Yourself, Find Yourself, helping raise awareness and decrease the amount of stigma around mental health is just an everyday mission.
These Venture Teams and many like them are making great strives towards both increasing education on mental health, and creating a more accepting environment for those with mental illness. In many schools, there is simply not enough being taught on the subject of mental health. You will find that many schools have taken health classes out of their curriculum, or only focus on the physical aspects of health, not the mental. This lack of education in many schools has created an environment where many students simply do not know anything about mental health, even though the amount of adolescents diagnosed with illnesses like depression or anxiety has gone up over the past few years. These days, it is more important then ever for students to be informed on mental health, to either help themselves, or their friends.
These Venture Teams have shown that a little education can go a long way, and have made amazing progress towards ending the stigma towards mental health.