LITTLE CHUTE, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Little Chute High School students are trying to remove the stigma of mental illness and suicide.
Students worked with school counselors and Prevent Suicide Fox Cities to host an all-school mental health wellness festival.
Snakes and mental health – you probably wouldn’t think the two would go hand-in-hand. But at Little Chute’s festival, put together by students in the Sources of Strength Club, even the Snake Guy at the featured petting zoo there served a purpose in improving mental health.
Some animals were meant to be therapeutic for students, others were meant to help them face their fears.
While snakes may be scary for some, Sources of Strength Club members say not addressing mental health issues is scarier.
“Yes, mental health can be scary, but it’s not something that you have to be scared of,” vice president of Sources of Strength Logan Maass said.
Although Maass says some may be dealing with some really heavy, sad, dark things, bringing in the snakes and other animals was a way to try to still have fun, even through the tough times.
The mental health wellness festival also included national motivational guest speaker and author of two books: “My Last Step Backward” and “My Next Step Forward” Tasha Schuh, who shares her own struggles and triumphs in life.
Schuh empowers youth and adolescents to live a life of resilience and hope. She inspires and challenges her listeners to overcome and persevere, no matter what life throws at them.
Students created a “Wall of Wellness,” honoring special people they look to as their source of strength. The school also had other motivational displays and posters.
“Mental health is not something that you can just bury in deep, you need to have someone to talk to, whether it’s a friend, a teacher, a therapist, a family member, someone that you can talk to and not bury it all inside,” Connor Odle president of the Sources of Strength Club said.
This is the 5th year Little Chute’s Sources of Strength Club has put on this booth-style mental health wellness festival for their peers.
But this time around, it’s the biggest and likely the most important.
“There’s some kids that still haven’t recovered from the pandemic, and they’re still struggling either with their family, or financially with their family, or some middle schoolers that don’t know what’s going on in their school, because they haven’t been here for two years,” said Odle.
The purpose of the festival is to eliminate suicide.
“They wanted Little Chute; their class to graduate as a whole class and not to lose anyone to suicide, and we’ve accomplished that,” Reffke said.
More than 25 wellness-centered community organizations had booths at Friday’s event.
Approximately 660 Little Chute High School students and 8th graders attended the event.
You can find suicide prevention resources here.
