MIS Sanctuary

MIS Sanctuary is a student-led organization which aims to create a space within the school community wherein discussions about mental health can take place. In our stressed and busy lives, especially during the pandemic, we want to help students to feel more comfortable in talking about their mental health needs and concerns. In the last few years, communities and the public have become a lot more open and comfortable while discussing mental health. This is extremely important and something that needs to be encouraged. When joining Sanctuary and being a part of it, I wanted to help in extending this open-minded attitude into our school community.

Mental health has always been something that I have seen as extremely important, and that needs to be acknowledged in a more comfortable setting. Very often in the past, people see discussions on mental health to be a sign of weakness, when in fact that is entirely untrue. As human beings, our mental health is simply just as important as our physical health. When you break your leg, you do not keep walking on it, or get ridiculed for resting it, so why is the same not true about mental health? This has always been something that frankly confused me. When I found out about Sanctuary, I realized that it would be a great opportunity to express and share the importance of mental health in our school.

I was also very interested in being a part of Sanctuary because I am aiming to pursue Psychology in university. Working with other people and taking part in researching and expressing to the school community ways in which we can deal with all the stress of online schooling, universities, graduation and so many other issues is something which connects well to that in a school environment. It also simultaneously allows me to explore and be able to understand the importance of mental health and find helpful techniques that help me. This is helpful as I have seen that while some coping mechanisms or grounding techniques greatly help some people, they might be entirely ineffective to others. Due to this, I have found being a part of Sanctuary extremely helpful, especially in the last two DP years.

MIS Sanctuary has also created a website wherein we have written articles about the issues stated above. Our three main pages are ‘Resources’ ‘Mindfulness’ and ‘Study Tips’.  Our current team consists of 5 people, out of which three of us worked on the articles on the website. The entire team worked together to plan and design the website through one person. We made sure to keep our aim in mind and wanted to make the core aim of the website to simply just be helpful in any way possible. Since the aim was to make the website as easily accessible as possible, we tried to keep the layout and format as user-friendly and clear to understand as possible.

Another way that we have reached out to the school community is through social media. In order to introduce Sanctuary and our aim, we thought that the best way to connect to most of the school community would be through an Instagram account as many teenagers have social media and often use it to connect to one another.

As most of our team is made up of DP2’s, we are hoping that we can collaborate with some more younger students moving forward and can pass Sanctuary along to be continued in the upcoming years.MIS Sanctuary Website Link:https://missanctuary.wixsite.com/missanctuary

Kyra (DP 2)