Becoming a changemaker

As of early 2019, Mountain Brook Junior High School currently hosts the only TEDx youth event, designed primarily for students under the age of 18 to share ideas with the community, in the state. 

In November 2018, MBHS junior Elaine Russell was chosen as the third student from the MBJH TED-Ed Club to present a talk in front of a global audience at the official TED headquarters in New York. It was a speech she had previously given for her club as a freshman.

“My mom and dad couldn’t wait to tell me. I didn’t even have words. We talked about it for so long and about how excited I was because it was so cool to be able to go somewhere where I could put my story out even further, not just my small Mountain Brook community, but the entire world,” Elaine Russell said

Currently, there are 3,200 TED-Ed Club groups actively meeting, MBJH event and class organizer Suzan Brandt said, and the classes aim to act as a student voice presentation and literacy curriculum. After TED-Ed organizers watched Elaine’s talk, along with 60,000 others speeches all across the world, hers was chosen as one of 13 to be streamed live at the international annual TED-Ed event. 

“It’s such an honor that Elaine was selected. It’s a great talk and was shared with over 122 countries — that’s pretty amazing,” Brandt said. 

The MBJH Ted-Ed program has been around for five years, Brandt said. TED-Ed is the youth and education initiative developed through the umbrella company TED, the internationally-known nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas through the form of short, powerful TED Talks and independently licensed TEDx events, like the annual MBJH event. 

The subjects can range from global to local issues to personal stories like Elaine Russell’s subject — how to deal with a friend struggling with mental health issues and codependence. 

“It’s a pretty hard topic to talk about, and no one really wants to admit to it that it’s become such a problem. We’re not really looking at mental health the way we need to look at it,” Elaine Russell said.

She got recruited for the MBJH TED-Ed Club in the beginning of her freshman year through her advanced English teacher, Andrew Cotton. She was accepted through an application process that all middle schoolers applying have to go through, since the club is not a class but still has a big workload. This March, the newest round of TED-Ed students will be presenting their speeches at the annual event March 16 at MBJH. 

Each week during homeroom, Elaine Russell met with the other TED-Ed members and started the year by picking out a topic they would craft a speech for, edit, memorize and then present at the TED-Ed event. In Elaine Russell’s year, she said she had 17 people in the classes, but this year, Brandt said, they have 12 students. 

The annual March event presents an interactive night that includes various stations, community groups — for example, the 2018 event included a drum circle as well as taekwondo lessons — and breakaway sessions, in addition to listening to the students’ speeches. 

“It’s built so that you can bring the community together, and if you’ve met someone that day, you can share an idea or maybe be inspired by an idea, and you can collaborate with someone. We hope that relationships are built during the event,” Brandt said. 

Going into the class, Elaine Russell said she had no idea what she was going to talk about. From the beginning, Cotton told her that she needed to choose a topic that she was passionate about or an important memory that stuck in her mind. She told him about a seventh-grade friend who eventually had to be hospitalized for self-harm and repeated plans to end her own life. 

Over the course of the year, Elaine Russell said, an unhealthy codependent relationship developed in their friendship and also family, all while she struggled with not knowing how best to help her friend as she dealt with mental illness. She eventually realized how stepping away from the relationship and letting professionals help her friend was the healthiest option for both of them.

“It was a hard year after that happened. I hadn’t really talked about it, and it was a little bit hard bringing everything back up, but I was also really proud of myself for being able to turn it into such a positive thing, you know, because I wanted to turn my story into something that people could learn from,” Elaine Russell said. 

When she first started her talk, she said she didn’t have a solution or specific takeaway from the experience, but as she kept writing and researching, she realized how much she learned that year. Her research led her to how important it was to ask for professional help and how to do that in the most responsible way, especially when she and her peers didn’t initially want to get adults involved. 

Less than 20 percent of children and adolescents receive needed treatment for mental health problems, according 2017 data from mentalhealth.gov. 

“It was terrifying at first writing that because I didn’t know how much I wanted to share or how people would respond to it, but I think it turned out better than I thought it possibly could,” Elaine Russell said.

Despite their close relationship, she didn’t want to talk to her mother, Anne, about the situation, which she found out a lot of other students struggle with through her research. Anne Russell said despite how talkative they thought the junior high kids were, there was a surprisingly small amount of people who knew about the situation, and most did not really talk about it. 

In her research, Elaine Russell learned just how much the stigmatization of mental health could stop people from talking about these issues. She said she also learned about statistics and how prevalent and widespread mental health issues are happening to youth.

For example, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) reports mental health issues are also closely tied to many suicide attempts in both adults and children. In previous years, 8.6 percent of individuals in ninth through 12th grade reported making at least one suicide attempt in the last 12 months. 

“There’s this gaping hole in which these kids who are hurting, they don’t go to adults and they don’t talk to the people they need to be talking to, so they turn to their friends and those friends just aren’t ready, and the adults just don’t really see that happening,” Elaine Russell said. 

Even though she describes the moments right before getting up on the stage at MBJH as some of the most nerve-racking minutes of her life, she said once she got up there, all the hours of memorization and practice came rushing back to her, and the talk easily flowed for the duration of the entire speech. 

Even though each student is supposed to shoot to have a speech at around 5 to 7 minutes, her speech actually ended up being about 14 minutes — simply because she had so much to say.

The applause at the end felt amazing, Elaine Russell added. When she came off the stage, she saw her entire soccer team had come to watch. When she found her sister crying after watching her speech, she also broke down in tears at all the support she received. 

Once it was posted on the official TED-Ed YouTube, she was surprised at the amount of people who contacted her and shared a similar story, or simply thanked her for helping them know what to do when dealing with a hard situation.  

“I can’t even put it into words what it felt like to know I was helping people just by telling my own story,” she said. 

In late October when she was chosen to be one of 13 global students to give her speech for TED-Ed in New York in November, Elaine Russell could barely believe it, and neither could her parents. 

By far, the New York trip has been the coolest thing she’s ever done, she added, and she loved being able to talk to people all across the world and meet so many students “who were so passionate about making a change” in their communities. 

People from all over the world streamed the talks live, and 100 international students were also chosen to attend the event and then participate in workshops and conversations afterwards with speakers about how to enact positive change in their communities. 

The whole point, Brandt said, is to expose the “room full of changemakers” to different ideas and connect them with student leaders from other communities. Brandt added how proud she was of Elaine. 

“She was willing to be so vulnerable. It was a topic that was very important to her … [Students] are really looking to solve the problems on their own, and Elaine figured out this is what you do, and this is what matters, and I need to share this. Now youth will listen to her, it’s not like my mom told me or my teacher told me so, this is from a peer,” Brandt said.

Anne Russell said she’s also proud to see her daughter turn a tough and chaotic experience into something that blossomed and helped people start talking about mental health. 

“Plus, it’s okay not to brush the experience under the rug. It’s okay to embrace it, and say, ‘Hey, we learned from this, and we are going to move on, and it’s part of us,’” Brandt said. 

Being part of TED-Ed, Elaine Russell said, taught her so many things, including the importance of confidence while speaking in front of others and giving presentations in class, in addition to being able to memorize easily and write something that has an impact on people. 

 “We have the best students in the entire world. They’re so driven and so passionate, and I find that so many of them want to see a change, but they don’t really know how to make it happen, so TED-Ed club at MBJH provides this opportunity to present the problem you have found and create a solution for it,” Elaine Russell said. 

Teens struggling with mental health can text 205-382-5465 and talk to trained counselors about anything. The text messages will be kept confidential. Locals can also call the Birmingham Crisis Line at 205-323-7778 to talk on the phone with a trained counselor 24/7. If the line is busy, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

For more information about the MBJH TED-Ed program, go to tedxyouthmbjh.com.