Depression has been a bane in my student community. It has grossly affected the mental health of students, thereby leading to a decline in academic performance and negatively impacting the learning process and learning environment.
On average, every semester, at least 20 students engage in self harm activities, smoking,taking hard drugs,drinking, and even attempted suicide. Also, an estimate of 5 students commit suicide because of depression and it’s related issues in an academic year. This statistics is very saddening.
My project aims to curb the effects of depression especially self harm, suicide and ills such as smoking,substance abuse and drinking associated with depression. This will further improve the learning process in the school environment by improving the mental health in the students thereby promoting SDG 3 - good health and well-being.
My project, ‘Your depression hotline’ aims to curb this alarming rate of suicide and self harm caused by depression. An awareness campaign would be organized and the student community of my campus will be sensitized and enlightened on practical ways of dealing with depression that does not culminate in self harm. This project will also create an avenue for students to share their depression stories with each other and with professionals to ensure we all realize that we are not alone in depression and we can fight it together. Depressed students will also receive counseling and advice on how best to deal with depression. This will help us build a community of students prepared to battle depression. During the duration of the project, asides a weekly counseling session to depressed students, a contact address will be made public to the student community so depressed students can reach out to us and share their depression stories and receive counseling to help them deal with depression. For the duration of this project, we will be partnering with the Mental Health Advocacy team of my university to provide professional counseling services to depressed students and to increase the reach and impact of our project
This project will be carried out on the main campus of Delta State University and it will cut across all 7 of the faculties present on campus .
We aim to reach an average of 20 students every week for the duration of the 3 months of the program and a total average of 240 students by the end of the project.
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