One year ago students at Belt High School teamed up with the nonprofit Alliance for Youth to develop the #Let’sTalk app. This app provides suicide prevention hotline numbers and multiple resources for tackling mental health.
This year, two Belt juniors, Keely Drummond and Maggie Andrews, are continuing to bring light to a topic they say isn’t discussed enough: mental health in teenagers.
“This year we wanted to dive deeper beneath the surface and attack one of the leading causes of depression, which is loneliness,” said Maggie.
“Conducted surveys in our school and we’ve done lots of research around this and we concluded that there are people that don’t feel included here at Belt,” said Keely.
They came up with the “We Belong” Campaign to show that everyone is in high school together and going through similar struggles no matter what clubs or sports you’re in.
They made a video to show the struggles, “That showed a girl that seems really popular at school but then when she gets home she doesn’t have a really stable home life. No matter what someone may show to you, at home or when they’re with themselves, they may not be the same person.”
With the help of Pepsi, they recently unveiled a new poster that hangs in their school’s gym that represents what the “We Belong” Campaign is all about.
The poster has students from Belt High School on it, each representing a different club or sport. “To really show that together all of the groups come together and make us who we are,” Keely added.
Maggie added that this campaign and the #Let’sTalk app is important especially in Montana, “There isn’t a lot of mental health resources and we just wanted to kinda get the word out there to help.”
The poster also reads, “We Belong to the Pack,” which is important because they are the Belt Huskies and also portrays the inclusion message.
“We also want to let them know that it is okay to be dealing with things and even if you don’t want your peers to know or other adults to know, there are people out there who can help you no matter what you’re facing,” said Keely.
