High schoolers talk mental health and substance abuse in photo gallery

While peering through a camera, Wareham High School students took a deep dive into how mental health and substance abuse impacts their community.

The Plymouth Area Prevention Collaborative worked with nine Wareham High School students to put on the Birds of Paradise Photovoice exhibit Tuesday, Dec. 16. Included in the exhibit were photographs and digital illustrations the high schoolers made looking at various topics such as mental health and substance abuse.

The collaborative’s main focus is to prevent kids from using illegal substances through various education efforts and events.

One of the exhibit's organizers and prevention coordinator for the collaborative Keoscha Pina said the nine students met with her and Wareham High School drama director Joey Ferro weekly for almost eight weeks to discuss substance abuse and mental health within the Wareham community.

The students were challenged to document these topics by going out into the community and taking photos that answered three questions; what does a supportive community look like, how does mental health impact the community and how does substance abuse impact the community.

“We provide the students with professional cameras and they’re supposed to take photos, come back and we have a discussion about them as a group,” Pina said.

Mae Hickey is also a prevention coordinator and exhibit organizer who said the goal of the project was to “uplift and empower youth voices.”

“We want to encourage [the students] to get involved in issues that they are passionate about and get their voice out there,” Hickey said. “The important thing is just giving them an outlet and letting them share their voices and recognizing the importance of that.”

One of the students who participated in the project was freshman Brianna Gabrey who said much of her work was inspired by nature.

“Something that I do to clear my mental health is I like to go on nature walks,” Gabrey said. “So I went on a walk, thought about the prompt and took a photo based on the prompt.”

Gabrey added the experience allowed her to learn more about mental health in general.

“Mental health affects people in many different ways and seeing how everyone’s photos and how they think about them in different ways really opened my eyes to how people interpret things and treat mental health,” Gabrey said.

Senior Trivia Amezian also participated and said using various digital arts tools in conjunction with the prompts was a powerful experience.

“My image of a city scape with a very muted color palette incited a lot of discussion and a lot of people seemed to resonate with the feelings I was sharing,” Amezian said. “People started sharing their own commentary on stuff that I hadn’t seen when I started to create the image.”

The experience has also encouraged Amezian to continue to use art as a way to speak on important issues.

“I think if there’s anything I’m going to take out of this it’s that there’s so much that you can do with the power of using your voice,” Amezian said. “I feel like this made it very easy for me to speak about things that impacted me.”

Born out of this project is the Wareham High School Youth Coalition being spearheaded by  drama director Joey Farro which aims to tackle various issues across town.

“[The kids] have such deep things to say about their community and how they feel about it because at the end of the day it’s their world so it’s important to know their perspective,” Ferro said.

So far the high school’s coalition has completed one project which was donating 272 lbs. of food to Damien’s Food Pantry the day before Thanksgiving.

Ferro said he and the students continue discussions on substance abuse and other issues in Wareham while organizing projects to better the community.

“It’s really cool because we’ve really just got the ball rolling,” Ferro said.