Why do overdoses happen? – Mental Fitness
I quickly learned that drugs weren’t the actual problem. Generally speaking, trauma, lacking support, or people’s inability to handle stress were the true problems. Drugs simply eased their pain for a bit…
Still, what then was at the core of it all?
If teaching a mindset of resilience, acceptance, and empowerment could help people after they went through hard life events and started using drugs, maybe the problem wasn’t the drugs…
Over time, I witnessed people retrain their brains, become mentally stronger, and beat their addictions… I knew I was on to something.
Then it hit me! I finally asked the right question….
“Why aren’t we teaching this sooner and to everyone?!”
The REAL problem was that we weren’t teaching this mindset BEFORE hard life events took place.
We constantly say that addiction can affect anyone, but not everyone was learning how to train their mind to protect themselves against it.
With this epiphany, the next question was an obvious one: “How?”
How can we change a system so broken and backwards?
Well first, we’d have to reach people at a time when we could still easily reach everyone and preferably before really hard challenging life events happen.
The clear answer here is high school. Everyone is required to go to high school so we can reach everyone at once. Also, even though adverse childhood events can happen before the high school years, if we reach a student‘s mind in the teenage years, it’s still flexible enough to change more easily. With that, we have an even higher likelihood of reaching them before they go down a self-defeating path.
Again, though, how could we reach every high school student with a message of improving their Mental Fitness?
Well, we do it for physical fitness, don’t we? There’s already a requirement that every student from kindergarten to college work to improve their physical fitness. With this being a case, why not create a curriculum that allows every student from kindergarten to college to improve their Mental Fitness as well?
Sound bold?! You bet it is.
But here’s the honest truth. I don’t know if having a curriculum like Mental Fitness be a part of my cousin’s life would have led him down a different path or not.
I do know, however, that since his passing, it’s been my mission to figure out why these things like depression, anxiety, and addiction happen, and how I can do a small part and preventing them from happening to others in the future.
The cool thing now is that it’s not just me. It’s an entire movement of professionals, school districts, and recovery centers who are all aligned in seeing the same vision of our future.
Together, we can work to prevent mental health issues and addictions before they start. Together, we can change the future generations for the better.
