Axcel Martinez
Biology-Mrs. Nuvia June 19, 2017 Examining the teen brain health issue has helped me personally in a way that it helps me understand more about myself and the people that come to me for their problems. Before taking this class I’ve never really thought much about brain health, specifically in teens, but after this project I think that it’s helped me understand what it is and the stigma that surrounds it. I think that as an advocate I can help by informing people more on what a mental disorder is and what causes those mental disorders. After the NAMI walk I think that I am most proud of the amount of people that I was able to inform during the exhibition as they walked up to my groups table, but what I am most proud of out of the whole exhibition is that my group came up with work that they were proud of, even though there were times where we couldn’t figure out what we wanted to do for a morning activity, or for a NAMI walk activity. In the beginning I hardly knew anything about mental health. The only thing that I knew about mental health was that I could be through genes in a family, which in some cases are true for ex. Down syndrome, but afterwards I found that majority of mental illnesses are caused because of certain events. I learned this through the guests visits that we had with people from Dr. Kauffman’s lab and with people that we interviewed in order to do more research on the topic that we were working with. The topic that my group worked with was teen emotions and how the things that teens go through aren’t necessarily a “phase” but a process that the brain goes in order to complete itself, and since the brain completes itself from back to the front then it starts working on the more emotional part of the brain and all the “control” and stability of emotions is developed later. What helped us in the process of coming up for a final product/NAMI activity was going to visit different universities and hearing their research on brain health and how they use mice since there brain layout is similar to humans. We’d visit universities, made proposals for a specific topic of research, made weekly agendas, and had our work critiqued by peers and by professionals on teen brain health. These steps helped us come up with ideas that we came out with for the NAMI walk, At the start of the project we had to decide on a specific “Mental Illness” that we wanted to work on. I decided to research DID or Dissociative Identity Disorder. After we gave a presentation on our topic the teacher put us into groups, but she put us in groups that had almost nothing to do with our topic meaning that the groups were all different. My group consisted of DID, Drug Addiction, Bullying, and Emotional Trauma. Since we couldn’t have four-five different topics going on we had to either decide on one topic or find out what each of our own topics had in common. In the end we went with teen emotions since many of our topics focused around emotions.Some challenges that we faced was that our group tried to focus too much on there own topic and we could work well with each other. We were able to overcome this challenge by reminding each other that our topics focused on something that all people, specifically teens, face almost everyday. A book that we decided to read for our topic was called The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux. We decided on this book because it talked about how the brain processes certain emotions and how certain chemicals cause some of those emotions. The book that we read pretty much explained and gave examples on what the brain does, how it processes, and why it does/think the way that it does. Something that I was able to take away from this book is emotions are not all the same. Several of them, including happiness, love, sadness, fear and anger, probably evolved to serve particular purposes. Love in mammals, for instance, is likely to have grown out of the system of infant attachment to parents. Fear is part of a defense system that helps animals to meet dangers, including threats from other individuals of the same or different species, and has been part of the equipment of most animals since the evolutionary appearance of the reptiles. |