CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — An eight grader at Incarnate Word Academy made sure mental health awareness was openly discussed.
The student organization is called "Angels Defeating Mental Illness".
They held a therapy event on Wednesday that brought smiles to faces of many students as they got to play with therapy dogs.
Jackson Ramus's mission with ADMI is to help the Incarnate Word Academy community to move from a state of distress to success.
"I have a dog at home. He's a little black dog. His name is Sparky and I pet him whenever I'm stressed out and it makes me feel so much better," Ramus said. "So I was like, I want to extend that and I want to give it to kids here during our exams and their foreign language exams today."
The event proved to be a much needed distraction and gave students a time to take a breather from testing.
"He was so so cute," Ramus said. "He was so so soft too he fell asleep, actually. And people were petting him, it was so cute."
Although Wednesday's event brought smiles, the reason Ramus started the organization was during his own troubling times.
"I wanted to start this program. Because a few people in my family, we had to bear the weight of it in our family committing suicide, and it does a lot to a family," Ramus said. "And we want to try to stop that, especially with a lot of like academics as they can be a lot of stress put on you from school."
Ramus recognizes that at the core of what it means to be human. People just want to be seen and heard.
"We connect people if they need it with academic help and teachers and all that," Ramus said. "And we also do tell teachers that sometimes anxiety does have a lot of things to play into it. And that's what we don't like and we want that to be really brought down. That's what we're trying to do." "When I came in eighth grade, I was like, I want to do something about it. And it brought us to here right now."
To learn more about the student organization, Angels Defeating Mental Illness (ADMI), visit the Contact page to reach them on their site: iwacc.org
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