Why I chose to research this topic
Throughout my years creating my projects in the Apollo program, I have been drawn to mental health awareness. This year I have decided on focusing on mental health awareness in the United States. For this project's thinking skill, contextualization, I wanted to understand and see how mental health awareness can be showed to others in different communities. The message that I wanted to share is that mental illness shouldn't be seen as shameful. We should help one another when individuals are trying to open up about how they are feeling and what they are experiencing.
English
For the English portion of my project, I created a magazine article discussing what mental health stigma is, what are the effects of the stigma on an individual, and what we can do as a community to support the individuals who are asking for the help that they need. Within the magazine I included images that I felt sent a message out to the reader and would stick with the reader as well. I also included text features and structures that I previously researched and took notes on within my magazine to make sure that I provided precise information to the reader. The way that contextualization was shown within this portion of my project was that I was able to break up the information that I found within my research and lay it out to the reader using text structures and features, discussing mental health stigma as a whole.
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Magazine Article |
Art
For the art portion of my project, I researched ways that individuals addressed mental health stigma. Many expressed their mental illness within their artwork, for example, a painting. Creating a piece of artwork like a painting can also be a form of therapy as well as trying to put an end to the stigma by informing others about what you go through with the mental illness. After I conducted all of the research about different organizations and individuals who created artwork to try to make the stigma come to an end. I decided to create my own painting about anxiety and what thoughts and emotions you may experience if you suffer from that mental health disorder. I was influenced by a painting that I found within my research, which lead me to painting about anxiety. I recorded my process of the painting from start to finish to show my thought and product process. The way that contextualization was shown within this portion of my project was that I was able to describe and show with research and my final product of my painting, is how mental health stigma is being approached and discussed in different community and ways we can make that change together as a whole.
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Painting ProcessFinal Product Painting |
Social Studies
For the social studies portion of my project, I created a mind map to create a visual of how the government views giving individuals and families mental health care and the factors that play into it. I included the research that I found throughout the process of my project and broke the information up between four separate categories. Some pieces of information in the mind map have a relationship with one another and are connected and color coded to represent that. The way that contextualization was shown within this portion of my project was that I was able to connect specific processes to a final outcome at describe the factors specifically to have an entire understanding about how the mental health care system works in the United States.
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Mind Map |