‘It’s okay to not be okay.’ ‘You matter.’ ‘Don’t let your story go unfinished.’ Around the school, many Spartans may have seen these messages, which hope to uplift stressed students as they go through their classes. Storyunfinished is a mental health awareness organization at White Station High School (WSHS) most known for their Instagram account (@storyunfinished_wshs) and posters that aim to improve Spartans’ mental health and to bring awareness to certain aspects of mental health. Storyunfinished first began as part of a Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA) competition in the second semester of the 2023-24 school year, which they plan to compete in again this year.
“The event is called ‘Mental Health Promotion,’ and basically you get into groups and each group aims to create a social media account that promotes mental health awareness on different topics,” Neha Kodali (11), a supporter of Storyunfinished, said. “You present your account to the judges and what you learned from it, and they grade you. No, [we did not win]. It was really disappointing, but they’re doing the event this year as well.”
When deciding what topics to post about, the main Storyunfinished team — Adaria Crutcher (12), Satvika Kodali (12) and Aisha Ceesay (12) — often refer back to a poll they conducted early on in the school year where they asked students what topics they wanted to see the account post. However, they also often try to relate their posts to the struggles students might be facing at certain times.
“Typically, we end up relating [the topics] to what’s going on in the moment,” Ceesay said. “For example, if a tragic event recently happened somewhere, we’ll post about how to deal with grief. Or, for example, when AP scores came out, a lot of people were distressed that they didn’t do as good as they thought. So we would immediately go [discuss] AP scores over any [other topic] because that was the most relevant.”
A large component of many of Storyunfinished’s posts are the surveys they use to gather responses about certain topics. For example, for a post about men’s mental health, they collected responses concerning the topic from WSHS students before making the post.
“I don’t know how, but we just manage to get a lot of responses [from the student body]; I think it has to do with [Storyunfinished being] the students’ outlet,” Satvika Kodali said. “It was something that the students hadn’t had before, so I think they want to fill out the surveys to be more engaged.”
Storyunfinished also periodically hangs motivational messages in hallways, stairwells and other locations throughout campus for students to see during the school day. They receive assistance from other student organizations and individual students to make these posters.
“We usually have a lot of people helping out designing the posters around the school,” Satvika Kodali said. “We don’t do it ourselves. [In] the recent poster-making session that we had with Key Club, we had many people attend and we made … posters [meant to inspire confidence] and hung them around the school for Suicide Prevention Month. People in our club help us [too].”
Since September is Suicide Prevention Month, Storyunfinished made several posts and organized several activities to support students struggling with suicidal tendencies. For example, they did a “paint and sip” event, which involved students painting while talking to their friends and eating snacks.
“In [Storyunfinished’s Discord server], they made an announcement saying that it was Suicide [Prevention] Month and to spread kindness,” Neha Kodali said. “I know that they are holding a few events [in September]; today, they had their ‘paint and sip’ event, which is a great way for people who sign up to destress and come together and listen to relaxing music [and paint].”
Many mental health resources online can often be overly positive, responding to complex issues with reductive solutions such as “things will get better” and “push through it.” Storyunfinished tries to avoid this type of issue through in-person events, among other strategies.
“I think it’s a lot easier to not be too positive when you are actually interacting with people more because when you only do it online, it’s a lot easier to just put out all this aggressively positive content,” Ceesay said. “And then if you end up putting all of this positive content out, a lot of the time you end up skipping over a lot of the darker things that people really need you to talk about.”
Overall, Storyunfinished has received positive feedback as a result of their posts. They plan to continue posting on their account, and they hope to continue making a positive impact on the students of WSHS.
“I believe we do make a difference,” Ceesay said. “I remember that there was a period around the start of the school year where I was really stressed and a lot of us weren’t posting because we are students too, and we had a whole bunch of [direct messages] being like ‘Where are you guys?’ and ‘I need you guys to post, I’m stressed.’ We realized we have to be consistent because a lot of people are relying on us to figure out methods that they can use to deal with their stress.”