Mental Burn-out

Mental Burn-out
Cheyanne Silver's painting 'Warm Blood' was inspired by her experience with a patient whose health continued to deteriorate. Silver uses her art as a way to process her own thoughts and emotions as a medical student.

https://www.luc.edu/features/stories/artsandculture/burnoutart/

“Mental burn-out” is a very serious issue that is happening to everyone. “Burn-out” is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It’s a result of excessive and prolonged emotional, physical, and mental stress. Many students often face this battle during extended break seasons, taking upper classes, and during the end of each trimester with finals happening. Not just students; everyone can face a difficult situation with mental burn-out because of their jobs and life situations.

 

MacKenna Harbison, a student here at Skyline states that she has had mental burn-out for well over a few years. “I definitely have experienced mental burn-out before. It started when I was in 7th grade and has happened around January-February every year since then.”

 

MacKenna then goes on to explain how having honors classes mixed with extracurriculars while having to deal with drama can greatly impact the burn-out as well. “This year was a lot. A lot of my classes got much more difficult as well as extracurriculars like debate, BPA, and Honors Society. However, it was along with personal stuff. Issues with friends and relationships. Honestly- it’s just every aspect of school whether good or bad, combined into one big bad thing.”

 

People deal with mental burn-out in many different ways. Some keep it in, some talk to people about it, and some people overwork themselves to an extent so that they push through it and still feel like they are accomplishing something rather than not doing anything. I asked MacKenna how she dealt with mental burn-out, and this was her response.

 

“Honestly, I don’t know how to deal with it. I find that talking to my mom about these issues helps a lot as well as my sister. I ultimately have to keep going but having the support of my family really helps.”

 

Taking a break from school every once in a while is a good thing. But missing school and not wanting to go to school is very bad if you can’t physically get up to go to it. This is what mental burn-out does to you. It makes you unable to do things because you’re so mentally exhausted. MacKenna thinks that something needs to be done about it. Something once or twice a year that’ll be fun for the students and let them relax. 

 

“A lot of people I know get burned out in the second trimester because nothing fun is happening. I think a way we can limit this burn-out is to provide more fun activities for students like an assembly or two. I also think that the topic of students’ mental health and burn-out should be a relevant topic of discussion at faculty meetings, so the administration can get more involved with this topic.”

 

Arson Gilbert, a student at Compass Academy, states, “Yes I have been recently struggling with my health due to stress from school and my job. That stress led to me having very little motivation to do anything and I stopped going to the majority of my classes because of it.”

 

Mental burnout causes a lot of exhaustion and unwillingness to do something because of the stress. This leads to not going to school, work, or not doing anything at all. “I dealt with this burn-out by quitting my job and trying to make some more time for myself so I can relax.”

 

Arson, the same as MacKenna, thinks that we should talk about it more and make it more well-known, as well as take it seriously. “We should deal with burn-out by talking about it more and taking it more seriously. A lot of people go through this and it absolutely sucks that no one is willing to help or talk about this problem.”

 

Mental burn-out is a very serious topic that should be brought up a lot more in society. It causes people to not want to do anything, to sleep all day, and not be productive. It affects the whole day. And not just making you feel exhausted, if this goes on too long, then there is a chance that it can go into some disorders like eating disorders and sleep disorders. We absolutely need to have breaks in life to push us away from things like that. Especially in a students’ life. Most of us have six classes to get through in the day. Everyone has some type of homework that has to be done the next day. Some of us have multiple projects due every day along with homework from other classes. The least we can have is an assembly every now and then that is meant to be fun. No education, just a fun activity where students can do challenges, win prizes, and laugh along with each other like they did at Eagle Rock Middle School. This isn’t just for the students either. The teachers would benefit from this break from teaching and grading and instead, get a free show to be amused.

 

Educate yourself on mental burn-out. Think of ways to prevent it. And most of all, talk to someone trusted if you need the help or a break. There are so many trusted adults in this school like the councilors, or your favorite comfort teacher that you can go to for anything in the world. People don’t need to overwork themselves. It’s good to take a break from life and relax.