Essay Sample: Should Kids Take Mental Health Days?

Students deserve a Mental Health day off for many reasons, but one of the first I should speak of is the recent events of disasters, shootings, suicide, and more things that can be labeled as trauma for teenagers  in this era.

As everyone is aware, shootings, and school ones at that, are vitally damaging to a students mental. Especially if they lost someone during that shooting or even saw them get shot and killed in front of them.  Many students were most likely scarred because of the Parkland shooting that happened in 2018. With celebrities even pitching in a bit of support to the Parkland survivors such as late musician/rapper XXXTENTACION, who came and visited a parkland survivor in the hospital and even made a song dedicated to the lost lives from the shooting, called “Hope”. X himself was also an influence and a leading force for support for people dealing with mental health issues, since X also dealt with issues in the past up to his time of his death. The main moral of the story here is, Shootings kill and shooting stains the image of what a teenager could possibly be doing which causes distrust between teenagers themselves and leads them to un-unify.

Furthermore, another reasoning for Mental Health days off is trauma. Everyone has dealt with trauma, yes. But teenagers are more likely to do something negatively about it since their brain isn’t fully developed to deal with such events, events that might lead to suicide. A divorce, discipline or even a family member can create trauma for a child at a very young age and later affect that child in their future years, reflecting on themselves as how they represent themselves and act. For example, a child might consider shooting up a school because they might want to prove their parents wrong about them being submissive and not being able to defend themselves. The terrible thing about this is that the parents are always claiming that they had no idea that their child was as described, but the reason why is because of their neglect and supervision over their child being very poor, or a child could commit suicide after repeated yellings and abuse from their parents claiming that they were never good enough and that they are a disgrace to their family could easily drive them to suicide just to end the internal and external suffering they are experencing.

In addition to all those reasons, one vital reason for the need of mental health days is simply, bullying. Bullying at school is one of the most common things a child and teenager face, all with their different ways of handling. Some might just ignore those bullies and move on with the rest of their day. But some might take it terribly, one might kill themselves over the pressure and the utter demand of such a request and the other might take it out and start a fight, or even worse, a shooting. Bullying is something that schools have tried to prevent and or belittle it a lot. Most bullies are bullies because of their situation at home as well, so it's a full circle. A child bullying another child because they don’t feel secure about themselves and pick on another one so they can feel the same.

All things considered, Mental health days are needed to not only support a student but to also let the student collect their thoughts and piece themselves together up again for the next day. Schools are slowly adapting to this formula and it has brought positive results.