Active Minds Hosts Speaker on Mental Illness

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Julia Mangan

On Tuesday, February 9, Active Minds, a new club working to break the stigma about mental illness on college campuses across the nation, hosted John Shuchart. Shuchart is a mental illness activist who has struggled with mental illness himself.

“As I sat watching the Notre Dame vs. Michigan State game on TV, my mother leaned over to me and said, ‘You are not the brightest of my four sons.’ At the time, I didn’t think anything of it,” said Schuchart.

But, it was traumatic events like this that eventually led to Shuchart’s depression.

Shuchart graduated from Michigan State with a business degree. After graduation, he began to work for an insurance company where he was successful, but he had a change in passion and began travelling across the nation to talk about mental illness.

In his life he has survived both cancer and depression and he is not ashamed to talk about either. His purpose is this: “we broke the stigma about cancer and HIV/AIDS, and we need to break the stigma about mental illness”.

The final message Shuchart gave to the audience was that people with mental illnesses need to stand up and start talking about it; that it is not something to be ashamed of, because it is not your fault. Everyone else needs to listen and be a friend. Silence kills.

With 25% of students having a mental illness themselves, it is likely that everyone is affected in some way by the disease. Suicide is the second leading cause of death on college campuses, and Active Minds is working to change that.

For more information on Active Minds, email Maggie McCune or Victoria Zanaboni to be put on the email list. The club will be hosting monthly meetings.

If you want to read more about what Shuchart’s life or what has to say, you can buy his book, “You are not the brightest of my four sons,” or visit his website, notthebrightest.com.