The Full Story
Purpose and Goals
About Us
Our mission is to provide readily available resources for mental health education, empowering generations to combat misinformation and access barriers. The heart behind our mission focuses on our friend Jo.
Jo suffers from generalized anxiety disorder and clinical depression. At lunch, she often withdraws into herself, tuning out the world by watching those baking videos that she loves so much. She dreams of attending medical school and hopes to pursue baking as a hobby after her family's financial instability resolves. Jo often takes care of her parents, first-generation immigrants who don't speak English, and her younger siblings. In fact, Jo would often joke she was the "second mother" of her siblings. In her eyes, she needed to repay her parents because she viewed herself as a burden. During the Covid 19 Pandemic, the isolation exacerbated her mental illnesses, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in middle school. Once again, in high school, the pressure of her home responsibilities, grades, and more accumulated in her attempting suicide just last summer. After spending time in a psychiatric hospital, we realized that mental health is often overlooked, especially for students from underprivileged communities.
It's students like Jo who need a "home" like Mindful Lodge: the parentified son and daughters, the children of immigrants drowning in expectations to honor our parents sacrifices, and the still-healing individuals who, despite their pain, find the strength and bravery to build resilient inner "homes" and remain compassionate in a world that may not always have shown the same kindness to them.
To make sure others don't have to endure what Jo went through, we raise awareness about behavioral activation therapy: a therapeutic approach that aims to reduce avoidant behaviors by purposefully scheduling activities that align with individual goals and values, to activate feel-good chemicals like dopamine to reinforce positive context situations. (University of Michigan, n.d). By counteracting depression and anxiety behaviors and moods, improving overall well-being becomes more realistic as the cycle of behaviors feeding negative esteem is gradually replaced through systemic progress (University of Michigan, n.d).