Congratulations and happy birthday to Destine Hargrow, our inaugural recipient of the LouCouPsych Scholarship! Destine is graduating soon from John Champe High School and is planning on attending Hampton University in the fall. Watch her and her mother's live reactions to being awarded the scholarship, as well as read her winning entry below.
Thank you for all the donors for the 2020 Scholarship; you made this possible, and we are already gearing up for 2021!
"Mental health is something people should take more seriously. You never know when someone might be struggling with it. I learned that the hard way.
Around the beginning of fall 2018, my friend told me that she would cut herself because she felt that was the only way to make the pain go away. I was devastated when she told me. It broke my heart. What made it even worse was how she was three hours from me and I couldn’t just go see her when she was feeling this way. She would say things like, “Des. Please come home. I need you.” whenever she was getting really depressed. I was told by her that I was the only person she had, and that she couldn’t talk to anyone else about it.
At one point I tried to tell her to tell her parents, and after a lot of convincing she finally did. Her parents then took her to the doctors and they prescribed some medicine for her. That helped for maybe a month. Then she started going back down the hole. She would take these breaks away from her phone and society to help clear her mind. This one week she wasn’t answering me so I figured she went on a break because she was telling me about how she wanted to take one soon. So I didn’t think anything of it. Then I got a text from her while I was in my first block class and she just said, “Hi des.”, and I was so happy to hear from her so I responded with, “Hi love!”. Then she sent me another text saying, “You don’t know do you?”, I said “Know what??”, she said “I almost killed myself last friday.”. My heart instantly dropped.
Why wasn’t I aware of any of that going on? Why didn’t she call me or text when before she made her decision? So many thoughts were going through my head. I stood up with tears in my eyes and told my teacher I needed to go to the counselor. I told her everything. My friend told me she spent the last week in the hospital and in a psych ward. I couldn’t believe how serious this was.
Thankfully, after some counseling, new friends, medication, and long opening talks, she’s doing so much better and hasn’t harmed herself in over a year. That whole period showed me how important mental health is. I had no idea she was suicidal until she said something.
That just shows, there could be someone in your class or work that is suffering and you would have no clue. That is why people should be nice and respectful to everyone because you never know what’s going on in their life. People should have to take a class on mental health just to help them prepare for situations with people with a mental health issue. It would help decrease the amount of mental health issues going around."