Last March, the old ice bucket challenge from 2014 was relaunched for a new cause by the University of South Carolina’s Mental Illness Needs Discussion (MIND) club. This time, USC revived the trend to increase people’s consciousness on well being awareness after the loss of a student. The challenge eventually reached Roseville High School in April, gaining involvement from many students of all grades. When doing the challenge, the nominee is supposed to first record themselves thanking the person who nominated them, and then nominate three or more people next to take on the challenge. Finally, the video ends with the said nominee getting a bucket of ice water dumped over the top of their head. After their footage is posted to social media, the next nominees then have 24 hours to respond with their video.
“It came to me that the University of South Carolina had a student who died due to mental health related issues, and they want to bring awareness to that and so they did a whole ice bucket challenge in honor of him and bring mental health up to surface again to make it more aware,” junior Ryan Pettersen said.
“I decided to do it because it raises awareness for mental health, it was originally for ALS, I think this time around mental health is a very important topic to talk about,” junior Evelina Florea said. “I love the fact that it’s being shared. It is such a sensitive topic but it’s not looked down upon when talking about it and being more open.”
After being reactivated, the USC speak your mind trend went extremely viral, reaching millions of people. In terms of RHS’s involvement with the challenge, many individuals either had seen it online or had already done the challenge.
“I mean, it has a lot of attention to it so I think it did really good at spreading the awareness, I mean I’m pretty sure everyone knows about it so it did do it’s purpose. I think it did a good job,” Florea said.
“I participated because everyone’s doing it and it’s for a good cause, it’s to bring mental health awareness to surface and I really like that, I’m a big advocator for mental health awareness,” Pettersen said.
Since its rebrand, the challenge rapidly spread to multiple different social areas, revealing to individuals how linked everyone is. It is safe to say that the USC speak your mind challenge served its purpose to bring awareness to mental health issues and bring everyone together.
“I think it’s really made us all connect because everyone’s nominating one person after another to do it and it’s not just our school, there are so many schools around the entire country; around the entire world, celebrities are doing it, pretty much just everyone is doing and so I think it’s really cool to have people nominate you for it and then you get to nominate other people for it,” Pettersen said.
“I remember seeing the trend just spread through people I didn’t know at first and then it got to our school and it was just pretty cool seeing how we’re basically all connected,” Florea said. “It’s just showing how we are genuinely a big family and we should be able to be comfortable and talk to each other about these mental health issues and, you know, what everyones going through.”
“It was a very fun challenge, it was obviously very uncomfortable because it was so cold, but I think if you got nominated it would be fun to do it just because what other things do you have to do? I think it would be fun to just do it. It would be fun to just experience something like that because who knows if the ice bucket challenge will ever be a thing again,” Pettersen said.
