As a sophomore in high school answering Peer Health Exchange (PHE) Youth Advisory Board question, “What does health and wellness mean to you?” I remember not feeling confident in my answer. I knew what mental health looked like in my mind from classroom knowledge, working free health center fairs and clinics, and accompanying my grandparents on their psychiatry visits, but I wasn’t sure how that resonated with the general population and my fellow peers.
As I started my first year as a PHE Youth Advisor, the message became clearer. Working to co-create curriculum on mental health, sexual identity, and overall wellbeing for high schoolers, like me, nationwide, I was able to ingrain my perspective and translate my experiences growing up in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles into module text. By seeing how these modules were received by my fellow peers, I understood how much weight my voice had, and how others could learn from my personal experiences and take on mental health. I also fact-checked myself, learning new information about mental health by delivering these texts that I didn’t know before. Working alongside fellow young people from across the country on these projects empowered me to drive tangible change, reflected in PHE’s social media, community advocacy, and deliverables like selfsea and other online resources for mental health wellness.
That work continued and grew over the years, from producing initiatives promoting reproductive health access to tangible modules on workforce and employment for unhoused youth. Now, as a junior in college studying Natural Sciences on the pre-med track, I understand that health and wellness knowledge looks different for everyone; it’s dependent on the context of their upbringing so that the information can be delivered as efficiently as possible, and it is also dictated by their differing experiences from the identities they carry.
Looking at my own neighborhood, a suburb in Los Angeles comprised of a majority minority and immigrant community, I still see health knowledge gaps where there is a lack of resources for mental health due to stigma, resources in languages other than English, and overall spaces where young people can come together to talk about their shared experiences anonymously, like PHE. The misunderstanding that mental health wellness should only be sought when starting to experience declines in mental health is still prevalent, with most peers refusing to seek therapy or other support until it’s too late. This is why the work of PHE is important – by showing that mental health should be consistently upkept like physical health and providing an online platform for people to know that they’re not alone, we fight against the misunderstandings and myths around health and wellness and push the envelope for what’s possible for young people around the world.