On Monday February 3rd I attended a Live Speaker Event on mental health for my sorority. The Speaker for our Standards of Education(SOE) Event was Ross Szabo. I enjoyed this lecture because Szabo approached the lecture from a personal angle. He knew that 100 plus sorority girls were forced into this room to fulfill an SOE requirement, and by no means wanted to be there. However, Szabo was such a talented speaker he could capture every audience members’ attention from the moment he began his lecture. Szabo was successful in making an emotional appeal to all of us because he told his personal story. Szabo did not simply lecture us about mental health and how we should live our lives.
Ross Szabo had his own personal struggles with mental illness as a young teenager and through telling his ‘personal story’ he could capture all our attention. Mental health is a very fragile, taboo topic among young women especially. There is a stigma that we as society put on anyone diagnosed with a mental illness. However, as Szabo explained, there are two types of mental health. Good mental health, and bad mental health. Good mental health involves motivating oneself to be better, and creating good coping mechanisms for oneself. However, when we think of mental health we think of cases of depression, anxiety, ADHD and bi polar disorder. Szabo stressed that we must embrace the concept of mental health and abandon this concept of mental health as being ‘bad’. I would love to attend another lecture from Ross Szabo because I learned a lot from it and I found it very enjoyable.
I would recommend attending a lecture by Ross Szabo to everyone I know!