Over the past few days, Pembina Valley Mental Health Awareness Week has drawn attention to the value of maintaining a healthy mind.

Kelly Vipond is in her second year as counselor at Carman Collegiate. Her work on a masters degree in counseling psychology created an interest in understanding people. 

Kelly Vipond is a counsellor at Carman Collegiate

“It’s such a great thing, an honour, to be able to work with teenagers,” says Vipond.

She believes that adults often forget that there are some important things happening in the teenage brain.

“When kids are little, their brains are blossoming and they're developing all of these neurological connections, they're figuring out the world. It's all brand new. The teenage brain is streamlining all of those connections to make them faster and better. But it's also going through a process of pruning where you cut off the pieces that you don't need. And so, a lot of the developmental task of being a teenager is to figure out 'who am I away from my family and who am I going to be as an adult?' ".

According to Vipond, the last couple of years have been challenging for teenagers, being forced to isolate at a time when they’re needing to learn to connect with the rest of the world and figure out who they are.

“I see a lot of young people who feel very alone and not really sure about what is right and what isn't right. They're really confused. Being able to sit with your child and have a conversation from a place of calm that allows for them to be in their storm and connect with you in a way that helps them to calm themselves and be able to think in new ways about maybe what's really going on.”

Vipond has learned that the frontal part of the brain keeps developing until the age of 25, and says teenagers rely on adults to tap into this area that controls the ability to think in new and different ways.

During the pandemic, the value of mental health has taken on added weight. Protocol-induced isolation has limited much personal interaction to social media. Vipond labels social media as “very addictive,” and recommends teenagers and adults alike practice digital sunset and sleep hygiene.

“We should all be trying to examine how long do [we] need to sleep. For me, it's eight and a half hours. For a lot of us we go to bed and our phones are right with us. There's a lot of science that says putting your phone away up to an hour or more ahead of your sleep time allows for you to be able to fall asleep easier. It slows some of the stimuli that comes from engaging with social media and technology and allows for you to sleep more restfully and have a higher quality sleep.”

Vipond says adequate sleep, eating regularly, engaging in healthy relationships, exercising and having things that feel good for oneself are all a huge part of maintaining mental health.