Seniors Maddie Sherman painted a door for mental health awareness for their passion project.

Q: What are you doing for your passion project, and what made you choose that?

A: “For our passion project, we decided to spread more mental health awareness by creating a mural painting. We wanted to create a piece that would represent what we see as important for the students in our school to hear. We decided to choose this as a subject for our project because we realized that students don’t have an understanding of how to control their emotions on their own time. We also understood that the biggest thing a student may need to hear are simple inspirational/ motivational words from a complete stranger. It’s the little things that matter to help make someone’s day.”

Q: Is mental health handled well in school? Why do you think that way?

A: “I think that there is a limit as to what is actually helpful for student’s mental health. Our school’s Guidance Counselors aren’t our therapists so there is a limit as to what they can do to help and sometimes even a counselor is intimidating to talk about your problems.”

Q: What was the inspiration for the design of the door?

A: “To be quite honest, we didn’t really have an inspiration for the door. We kind of went in with a blind eye to see where our creative ideas took us. In the end, we came up with an idea where we had inspirational messages written on large books that look like skyscrapers. In front of the skyscraper books, we decided to have a person looking up at them as if they are challenging tasks to overcome. This represents that even inspirational messages can be intimidating to accept and overcome. But that’s what students may need to hear to overcome their challenging emotions.”

Q: What made the two of you want to work together on this project?

A: “In the beginning, we wanted to work together because we had a similar idea. Both of us love to make art. We also saw that mental health is a serious issue that not many people know how to bring it up. By combining our skills and our topic of importance, we came up with ‘Mental Murals’ as our overall project.”

Q: What kind of an impact do the two of you seek to make with the conclusion of this project?

A: “The impact we hopefully wish to make is that maybe others will want to create similar murals all throughout the school. This can spark a fire into wanting to make school a safe and comfortable environment.”

Q: What advice would you give to other high schoolers that suffer with mental health struggles? 

A: “The biggest advice I can give to high school students is that not all challenges can be faced alone. It’s always okay to not be okay. Maybe even a little message from someone you don’t know could brighten your day. So if you want to move forward and get better, it’s okay to ask for help and lower your walls.”