Mental health group founded by teens, for teens, is fighting to put an end to ‘crazy’ stigma surrounding depression and other conditions
- Katelyn Au Yeung and Benedict Law, both 17, started Mental Health Notebook a year ago to help teens overcome mental health conditions and raise awareness
- The group offers free online therapy sessions, and aims to change school curriculums to include mental health classes. It’s even going to the UK parliament
When I was 13 my mother, who was 38 at the time, was diagnosed with depression. It was the seventies. “Mental illness” wasn’t a “thing”.
My mother’s condition was dismissed by many as malingering, and it initially confounded her family doctor. It was only when she presented the Oxford Dictionary’s definition to him and asked: “You don’t think I could be ‘depressed’, do you?” that she was able to get a diagnosis.
She was admitted to hospital for electroconvulsive therapy – in which electric currents are passed through the brain to intentionally trigger a seizure – and prescribed antidepressants, which she has continued to take ever since.
The condition was so unknown back then that few knew what to think of it. Dad asked me to ask her friends to visit her in hospital. “What’s the matter with her?” they asked. “She has depression,” I explained. Some wondered what she had to be depressed about. Most did not visit.
At the time, I could have done with the help of Benedict Law Hin-tak and Katelyn Au Yeung. The organisation these two 17-year-olds have co-founded – Mental Health Notebook (MHN) – aims to improve teenagers’ mental health and their awareness of it, and to end the stigma that surrounds the issue so it can be talked about freely. It is “created by teenagers, for teenagers”, say Ben and Katelyn.
