By Nell Trainor
After several suicide attempts and a nine-month hospitalization due to her mental illness, college student Isabelle Cole started an organization called 13 Reasons to Fly, which aims to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Cole grew up in Massachusetts and is the youngest of three children.
“I struggled a lot with my mental health as a result of what was going on with my family,” Cole said.
According to Cole, her parents were divorced, her sister had cancer and she ultimately developed an eating disorder.
“My whole life I was trying to be the perfect child that no one had to worry about,” Cole said.
“I developed my own mental illness one because I have a genetic predisposition and part of mental illness is due to an actual chemical imbalance in the brain, however when these traumatic events happened in my life, that is when I started struggling with depression, my own eating disorder, and anxiety,” Cole said.
Cole said that her sophomore year of high school is when she attempted to take her life for the first time.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), globally, depression is one of the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents and suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15-19-year-olds.
The World Health Organization also states that eating disorders commonly emerge during adolescence and young adulthood and eating disorders affect females more commonly than males.
Due to her experiences in and out of hospitalization, Cole is adamant about advocating for better mental health care change.
She started the organization 13 Reasons to Fly after being hospitalized when the hit show “13 Reasons Why” was released on Netflix telling the story about a fictional high school student who had taken her own life.
“This is why I started 13 Reasons to Fly as a campaign to sort of flip the script and to give people reasons to live and to hold on to hope,” Cole said.
Cole said that when she was in the hospital, she was surrounded by other kids battling with their mental health and she came to a realization that oftentimes, they had much less of a support system than she had.
“I started spreading hope and my message around the hospital that there are reasons to live and that life can be hard, yes, but we should be talking about accurate depictions of mental illness, not this glorified thing that we are seeing on Netflix.
In 2016 after her release from the hospital, Cole launched 13 Reasons to Fly with the help of the Department of Mental Health of Massachusetts because they saw that this had the potential to help other people recover.
13 Reasons to fly is a non-profit that aims to start the conversations and stigmas around mental illness in a hope-oriented way.
“For the past four years we have been operating under this mission and I share my story wherever I can but my goal ultimately is to empower and bring in other youth voices because I know that mental illness is so prevalent,” Cole said.
One of Cole's other goals is to get mental health programs in schools to be taught as a part of education in middle schools and elementary schools.
You can find out more about these programs at the website 13reasonstofly.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment