New mental health publication created by and for students

Meeting as random roommates during their freshman year, Helen Sohn and Jessica Pan made the transition from high school to college together. As they navigated their first year together, they realized that USC lacked a space specifically focused on mental health student mentorship for new Trojans to make the adjustment to navigating adulthood in the new environment of college together. 

To address this need, the pair founded the GIVE Foundation this semester, a content creation-based club that compiles mental health resources in an accessible online platform. The leadership team chooses three themes each semester, such as this semester’s themes of lifestyle, relief and self-love, for their members to focus on, and the members are divided into different teams to create podcasts, blog posts and other forms of media. The GIVE website also features an anonymous post section where users can confess about an issue they’re struggling with to help students realize that they are not alone. 

“Our club is mostly content-based, so it’s not like where people have to actively invest in something to get something out of it … You don’t have to raise a flag and say, ‘Oh, my God, I need counseling, I need help,’” said Sohn, a sophomore majoring in health promotion and disease prevention. “It’s just something that anyone can click on our website or look at our social media and take a look at what seems interesting and figure out what they could benefit from.” 

Something that makes GIVE unique compared to other publications about mental health is the club’s emphasis on the positive ways people mitigate stress. 

“Through sharing their personal stories, we don’t want to be stressing, ‘Oh, like college students are experiencing alcohol abuse, like substance abuse, like people are depressed’… we want to be a club that stresses that … college students have the ability to go through these very difficult times through the help of us and our community,” said Pan, a sophomore majoring in neuroscience. 

As pre-health students, Sohn and Pan both recognized the amount of intense academic work and extracurriculars that students of all majors, but pre-health and pre-law students in particular struggle with. Growing up in competitive school environments before entering college, the duo also felt that mental health was an issue that needed to be addressed at USC, especially after hearing about a lot of students who died by suicide in the beginning of their freshman semester. 

“In high school, we had a couple of students struggle with like mental health issues like depression and eating disorders, and we’ve actually had students [die by suicide], and one thing that helped some students get back on their feet was, we had an anonymous confessions page,” Sohn said. “And I think [having that at USC] would help students realize that they’re not alone in this process. I feel like a lot of students who definitely have to come from out of state or don’t have older siblings to help guide them through that transition could definitely benefit from that.”

GIVE’s structure of dividing members into content-creating teams also helps foster an “intimate environment” to make friends and connect with each other online while still learning something new about mental health. 

“We’re so thankful for each other, even members,” Sohn said. “We’ve all been helping each other with the process of getting registered and starting promotions and figuring out how to structure our club because we didn’t want to be the organization that stresses people out when we’re trying to talk about stress.” 

GIVE’s goal of sharing advice and mental health resources was aided by the coronavirus pandemic and the onset of quarantine, due to a higher emphasis on the importance of mental health.  

“During the pandemic, you just have so much more time to yourself … and I think that kind of makes people face what they’ve been struggling with,” Sohn said. “Especially because everything’s online every day, it feels like the same routine, and you’re questioning yourself like, ‘Why? Why am I doing this? Why is this happening?’”

One of GIVE’s most active members is Maggie Lee, a sophomore majoring in business administration and NGOs and social change, who runs a mental-health focused podcast available on GIVE’s website titled, “It’s Growing Season.” Lee’s podcast began as a personal project, but after members of GIVE’s executive board invited her to share her podcast on GIVE, she decided to join the team. Lee said she always wanted a platform to share her opinions and self-growth journey, and when she recognized that her strongest form of expression is through speech, starting a podcast seemed like the natural next step.

“What I love about GIVE is that we just want to be here for you,” Lee said. “We just want you to feel like you’re supported, and my goal is just to reach as many people as possible. One hundred people could listen, but what means the most to me is if two people really really resonate with it and start to feel like it had an impact on them.”

Lee began by sharing her close friends’ stories of self-growth and is now extending her reach to people around the world with different backgrounds, such as disability awareness activists, relationship coaches and spiritual teachers. While “It’s Growing Season” covers a variety of topics surrounding mental health, Lee is most passionate about normalizing the conversation about body love. 

“Body positivity is something that I really struggled with since middle school, and I feel like this is a topic that is very important and needs to be addressed because so many young people, especially young girls [and] teenagers who are so easily influenced by social media,” Lee said. “[Young girls and teenagers are] developing eating disorders … and they take whatever they see on social media as truth. I saw people on the internet who were really positive influences in my life, so I want to be that person for someone else.” 

Although Lee promotes her podcast on social media, a major source of mental health issues, she believes that curating one’s social media feed is an important way to combat the impact of online negativity on one’s personal life.

“If you feel bad about yourself after scrolling through Instagram, I feel like that means something’s wrong with your feed,” Lee said. “I think it’s perfectly healthy to mute people, to unfollow people, so you can protect your own mental health first, and I think having more body positive and people talking more about mental health on social media kind of combats that ratio, makes this more of a prominent thing on social media, so that more people are seeing that positive cycle.”  

Ultimately, GIVE aims to be a mindfulness resource collection not only for people to refer back to but also for researchers pursuing careers in the mental health profession. Pan has been reaching out to individuals outside of USC to contribute to GIVE’s mental health resources as well.

“I think what we hope to do with our platform — it’s a way to ground yourself in reality but also kind of come to terms with how the world is right now,” Sohn said. “Know that we have a community where you can figure out what you need help with and kind of connect with other people who might have something to share and help you with.”