PLV Scholarship Winner: Rosiana Falzon on Mental Wellness

A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation on the health and well-being of children in my home community of Orange County, California. The event was hosted by my local chapter of Junior League, JLOCC, and organized by the Orange County Children’s Partnership (OCCP). Each year, OCCP releases a report that summarizes community progress on matters related to health, safety, and education. I was heartened to see positive 10-year trends in several key areas (as also reflected in last year’s more recent report):  OC kids are healthier than they were a decade ago, with greater access to healthcare, higher rates of immunizations, fewer teen births, and lower preterm and infant mortality rates. They’re also safer, with lower rates of substantiated child abuse, fewer preventable child and youth deaths, fewer juvenile arrests, and less gang-related activity. Let’s not forget that they’re smarter, too, with higher intellectual aptitude in all evaluated age groups.

Unfortunately, though, OC is far from becoming a Californian utopia. An alarmingly divergent trend is seen in the rising incidence of mental health issues in OC youth. The statistics are staggering: hospitalizations rates for mental health have grown by 73% over the past decade in children and teens. The number of teen suicides nearly tripled from 2007 to 2016, and Emergency Department visits for self-harm have increased by more than 25% in youth between the ages of 10 and 19. Moreover, 25% of OC teens feel chronically sad or hopeless, while 45% do not have high levels of school connectedness; both have been identified as risk factors for self-injury. This dispiriting rise in mental illness is not confined to OC, but is part of a broader trend seen in America, other industrialized countries, and developing nations alike.

Meet Rosiana

Rosiana Falzon, a 2019 recipient of the PLV Scholarship from Huntington Beach, is part of a growing movement that seeks to raise awareness about the prevalence of mental health issues. More than that, she hopes to destigmatize mental illness so that fellow teens can seek help without shame. Rosy has suffered from anxiety for as long as she can remember. But throughout childhood, her symptoms were so vague and diffuse, she was unable to recognize them for what they were: a treatable health condition. Who would have guessed that vocal cord dysfunction, chronic headaches, and other mysterious and persistent body aches could signal underlying emotional distress? Like many other high-achieving students, she had always — in her own words — “just been a perfectionist” and had taken her home- and school-related responsibilities very seriously. Her high school, Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA), is a competitive public charter school for artistically gifted students willing to devote extra time to pursuing their chosen art while maintaining a regular academic course load. Achieving balance can be tricky.

Rosy was unaware that her constellation of physical and emotional symptoms had a common origin until she began to experience debilitating depression the year before starting high school. When she eventually decided to tell her parents and family physician about how she had been feeling, she tried her hardest to convey the reality of her situation but wasn’t sure what mental illness even was; she had only a vague mental concept of this kind of unseen disability and therefore lacked the language necessary to describe her lived experience. Needless to say, the visit proved relatively unhelpful, with her doctor merely recommending that she establish a more regular sleep schedule. By then, Rosy began to suspect that her symptoms had a shared root. She asked her parents to take her to a psychiatrist and at last received a diagnosis.

For Rosy, this was a gateway to treatment through talk therapy. Her conditions had names. Knowing names can be empowering (a very old idea — think Rumplestiltskin). In Rosy’s case, being able to name her depression and anxiety had a strengthening effect because it armed her with a conceptual and linguistic framework from which to tackle her inner demons; other people had similar patterns of symptoms and had experienced relief. It was a painstaking process, but her spirit of resilience enabled her to call out maladaptive thought patterns and behaviors and replace them with new, more constructive ways of coping.

Having mental illness is like trying to run a marathon with invisible weights that only you can see. Expectations are the same for every runner even though some carry weights so heavy they need to work twice as hard to achieve half the distance. Mental health issues are the unseen burdens borne by many millions of people around the globe, indiscriminate of age, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, and just about anything else. No one can ever know what it’s really like to navigate life in someone else’s shoes. The effects can be profoundly isolating, and — at their worst — can make it feel like the mind has been hijacked. Even those people who have undergone successful treatment can have bad days or weeks, including relapse and moments of crippling uncertainty and self-doubt. Progress is often non-linear. There is no one-size-fits-all treatment plan, as there exist myriad approaches to diagnosis and treatment, including medication, bibliotherapy (e.g. self-help books), EMDR, TMS, the recovery model, viewing mental health problems as brain health problems, and various wildly divergent theoretical schools of talk therapy, some of which shun the idea of diagnosis all together in favor of strengths-based approaches in opposition to the medical model.

While the burden of mental illness may be substantial and multifaceted, a hallmark of true healing is compassion for oneself and others; the pain engendered by conditions like depression and anxiety often carves out space for love and empathy to fill. The survivor who emerges can shift from a position of inward retreat to a more outward-focused orientation in a process of growth.

Once Rosy received treatment, she began to passionately pursue her hobbies and interests. She rediscovered her incredible singing voice and began to immerse herself in singing all the time and in many different settings: concerts, operas, competitions, elementary schools, elderly care homes, her church, summer voice programs, and more. Her gift of singing brought joy to both herself and to her community, replacing the guilt and hopelessness that had stolen her happiness. In addition, she began teaching herself Mandarin — the native language of her beloved late grandfather — and volunteered at a local environmental nonprofit, where, among other tasks, she enjoyed identifying species of plankton through a refractometer.

Last but not least, Rosy founded the Mental Wellness Club at OSCA. Broadly speaking, the club’s mission is to inspire hope and understanding through a school-wide mental health awareness campaign marked by an ethos of openness and inclusiveness. The club provides an outlet for those students who — like Rosy in middle school — haven’t yet named their symptoms or felt truly seen or heard by others. Teens experiencing the weight of mental health issues can become their own advocates by learning how to tap into the resources available to them. Isolation can be superseded by the restorative sense of community that comes from talking to others who don’t judge because they have been there themselves.

Rosiana just began her freshman year at Pomona College in Claremont, where she plans to study Music. Read more about Rosy’s story in her own words below:

What inspired you to begin the Mental Wellness Club at OCSA?

Rosy: I decided to start Mental Wellness Club (MWC) primarily because I felt that there was a lot of need for it. OCSA can be a very high stress, high expectations kind of environment, and I felt that a lot of my peers and I were very stressed and burnt out. I wanted to provide a safe space in school where we could talk about issues involving mental health, and where us and our mental health could become our first priority and schoolwork could become second. I also wanted to start MWC at OCSA to help bring the conversation about mental health to OCSA students and to help normalize the idea of there being a conversation about mental health, even in a school filled with such high-achieving students. Even if you didn’t come to club meetings, you could see our booth at club rush, see us in class during lunch, or hear about a friend going to a meeting, and I felt that seeing and hearing about your peers engaging in the conversation, even if you personally didn’t engage in it, was something really powerful.

What would you tell a fellow teen or young adult who is struggling with mental health issues but is afraid to seek help?

Rosy: My advice for someone who is struggling with mental health issues (namely, depression or anxiety since that is my experience) but is afraid to seek help is, in the words of Shia LaBeouf, to just do it. The truth is that there are no shortcuts to getting better, and the longer you wait to get better is less of your life that you get to spend being happy. Sometimes when you’re really struggling, it can be hard to want to be helped (maybe you’re afraid of sounding “self-absorbed,” or maybe you don’t feel like you deserve to be or even can be helped), but taking the first step in getting help, even despite not wanting to be helped, is just so important. Also, if you’re really struggling and don’t want help, not wanting help is likely part of the reason you need help. Asking for help and actually getting help can be incredibly difficult, but the alternative to not getting help (suffering inside forever and ripping yourself to pieces) usually sucks more. So you just have to do it. Rip off the Band-Aid and tell someone you trust about what you feel, and if that’s too difficult or if you don’t have anyone in your life at the moment that you want to share that with, tell a trusted adult what you need. Sometimes it can be easier to tell a parent or guardian what you need, especially if they don’t know very much about mental illness or treatment. Talking to a school counselor, a parent or guardian, or a trusted family friend are all great places to start. And if one of them turns you away when you still feel like something is off, there is nothing wrong with going to someone else. I went to my GP first, and was told to “establish a regular sleep schedule” and a few months later I found out I was clinically depressed so… Sometimes, things just click better with different people. The same goes with therapists. If you still don’t like your therapist after a few weeks of sessions, you might want to consider seeing another one, and that’s okay!

Rates of childhood mental illness have soared in Orange County over the past several years. Since April 2018, the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) has dedicated 18 beds to mental health patients ages 3-17, making it the first pediatric inpatient psychiatric center in the region. How can adults better help young people in OC who are struggling with mental health issues?

Rosy: To start, we need to start telling kids what they might be facing. According to NAMI, “1⁄5 [of] children ages 13-18 have, or will have a serious mental illness,” and yet educating children about what they might face is not commonplace. A program or an adult in my life that could have educated me with just the basics about mental illness — what it is and why I should be aware of it — I think could have helped me tremendously.

The PLV Scholarship Board was struck by your artistic talent as an accomplished young singer at OCSA. Do you believe that art and creativity can inspire hope during difficult times? How does your personal experience speak to this idea?

Rosy: Yes, for sure art can inspire hope in difficult times. Doing something you enjoy and working toward something that’s potentially greater than yourself (especially when you feel like yourself isn’t the greatest) is an incredible way to start taking hold of things in your life again. It can be very hard to hate yourself whilst creating something that you love, and creating those little moments of cognitive dissonance can be very powerful. Art has this way of opening you up to new people and new experiences that you otherwise may have never gotten to have. Seeing different perspectives through art, namely through books and movies, also brought me a lot of hope.

People who suffer from mental illness often feel isolated and retreat into themselves. We know that examining one’s own thoughts and behaviors through psychotherapy can lead to positive change. But what about the contrary — how can more community involvement or a focus on others promote healing and growth? Please feel free to share your own experiences.

Rosy: In my experience, involving myself in my community through volunteering and surrounding myself with things and people I love really helped me change how I felt about myself. By doing things that I valued — teaching music to kids, performing, coordinating an Instagram account for a nonprofit that I was passionate about — it became really hard to in turn not value myself. I sort of see therapy and introspection as ways of getting out the negative thoughts and beliefs, whereas community involvement is like filling your mind and your life with love again. You need both to bring your life back to somewhere it can feel balanced again.

Do you think members of Generation Z — your generation — are more accepting of mental health issues than are older generations? Do you see the Mental Wellness Club as a part of a broader movement toward the destigmatizing of mental illness?

Rosy: I would say that my generation is generally more accepting of people with mental illness than older generations, and I think that our awareness is definitely greater through the work of nonprofits like Active Minds and through increased dialogue and representation in art and pop culture, but I do think that being accepting of people with mental illness and being aware of how mental illness or unhealthy patterns of thought affect you are two completely different things. As a recently graduated high school student surrounded by overachievers, I’ve seen the effects of stress culture and what it does to people mentally and physically, and I don’t think that the average person in my generation (at least from my perspective) is very aware of that. I do see MWC as part of the movement to destigmatizing mental illness, and I am hopeful that with more people sharing their experiences, especially in schools, we will be able to normalize the conversation.