The whole project is based on the mental health of teenagers. Now, first of all, we must consider why the Mental Health of teenagers can be a problem. I would like to answer this with one acronym: CBSE. The point in case.

 

Jokes apart… students these days experience a lot of stress and anxiety when you take into account puberty, CBSE, parents, exams, and whatnot. Now many are not capable of dealing with this kind of pressure. The result of this being that anxiety disorders are now the most common of all mental illnesses, especially in teenagers and are the leading cause of depression, substance abuse, suicide, and can even compromise your immune system, severely impacting learning and the ability to focus, having a lifelong impact. On top of that, 80% of them don’t even get the proper treatment.

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This is what global research papers show, but does this impact US? Now, we had the same question. How relevant is this problem in our school? To find this out we conducted our surveys, consisting of proper medical checklists. We were surprised to find out how severe this problem could be and how it increased with age. Our final data analysis revealed that in our school 1 in 4 students show symptoms of diagnosable anxiety. We also noticed that in teenagers, 1 in 3 students showed these symptoms. Keeping in mind we had a considerable sample size, it was safe to say that these were very concerning statistics and had to be addressed. This is what gave rise to the idea of a Technical Solution. Remember that, we will get back to it later in this section.

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We had also added a question as to whether or not people would like to use a device that could help us manage our day to day anxiety. We were further surprised to find out that a little more than a third of the people said ‘No’. Discussions with school counsellors led us to believe that there was this stigma attached to the topic of Mental Health. The common misconceptions being that a person was, for the lack of a better word, ‘mad’, or couldn’t handle their problems. 

That is when we realized that many people don’t know, that all of us experience stress and anxiety. We also realized that a normal device just won’t do. That is because no matter how great the device was, nobody would be willing to use it just because ‘nothing is wrong with them’. Hence now we also needed a Social Solution. Remember that, we will get back to it later in this section.