The Fire Drill We Never Had by Cameron

The Fire Drill We Never Had by Cameron - June 2025 Scholarship Essay

In school, we're taught how to prepare for a fire. The alarm blares, we line up, we walk out. We practice it so often that even in chaos, we move with muscle memory. But no one ever prepared us for the kind of fire that starts inside. The kind that doesn't trigger alarms, doesn't clear classrooms, and doesn't leave ashes-just silence.

That's why Mental Health Literacy should be a required class. Not an afterthought, not a week long unit buried in a health textbook, but a foundational course, as essential as math, science, or history. Because every student, no matter how "put together" they seem, is carrying something. And I know that because I was one of them.

But before I was the student, I was the son. My mother lost her own mother-my grandmother- to suicide while she was pregnant with me and my twin sister. There was no class that taught her how to grieve, how to process that kind of loss, or how to move forward with new life in her arms and death in her past. She has to figure it out alone, carrying trauma in one hand and responsibility in the other. She was expected to be strong, but no one ever showed her how to heal.

She raised us with everything she had-but I could still see it in her eyes. The unspoken weight. The unanswered questions. The silence no one taught her to escape.

And I realized: how many others are just like her? How many students will one day become parents, still carrying pain they never had the words to name?

We all learn how to diagram a sentence or solve for x. But what about how to survive grief. Or how to manage the crushing fear that you're not good enough? What about how to ask for help without feeling ashamed?

Mental Health Literacy wouldn't be about diagnosing disorders-it would be about demystifying them. It would teach students what anxiety really looks like, not just in textbook definitions, but in everyday behaviors: the perfectionist, the class clown, the overachiever. It would explore the way trauma rewires the brain, how stress builds in the body, how emotional pain can echo in physical ways.

But more than that, it would teach students how to breathe through panic. How to set boundaries with toxic people. How to say "im not okay" and not feel weak. How to respond when a friend confides something dark and heavy. How to name emotions they've been taught to ignore.

Because when we don't teach mental health, students learn to perform instead of process. To suppress instead of speak. And one day, they explore-or they disappear behind the perfect image.

This class wouldn't be a cure. But it would be a lifeline.

It would normalize healing. It would equip students to be more than just academically successful-it would teach them to be emotionally resilient, self-aware, and compassionate. It would raise a generation that doesn't fear therapy, that doesn't laugh off depression, that understands that vulnerability isn't weakness-its human.

And maybe, if we had a class like this, fewer students would feel like they're drowning in crowded hallways. Maybe more would know how to spot the signs, in themselves and others. Maybe a life would be saved not by luck, but by literacy.

If we can prepare students for fires in buildings, surely we can prepare them for the flames that dont't show on the outside.

Because mental health education is the fire drill we never had-and it's time we pulled the alarm.