This past Wednesday, 10/9/2024 Augustana College held another of its annual Symposium Days. This year’s theme was “Big Ideas.” Augustana’s website describes it this way:
Big ideas spark innovation in industry, breakthroughs in science, reformations in education, and even revolutions of whole societies. Some even say that the United States was founded on the big idea of democracy rather than on a shared ethnicity or culture. Whether we think of progress in terms of science, innovation, human rights, AI, and the nature of work, big ideas spark tremendous change–for good or ill. Given the complexity of the wicked problems we face–climate change, political polarization, rising levels of anxiety and depression–big ideas are needed now more than ever.
Augustana is promoting learning in a way that encourages its students to try and think about big issues.
I myself visited a few events on Wednesday. I participated in The Empowering Women Through Mentorship; The Gray Matters Collective: Social Entrepreneurship Saving Lives; and finally the Things I Didn’t Know I Loved poetry reading. While all of these had good things to share, the Gray Matters Collective presentation impacted me the most.
The presentation was led by the original founder of Gray Matters, Haley DeGreve, an Augustana 2020 alum. She shared even more about herself, including how she has struggled with mental health issues all her life. Not just this, but she allowed herself to be vulnerable to her audience about the specifics of these struggles by sharing that she has Bipolar 2, Anxiety, and PTSD. This kind of open speaking about mental health is something she wants more people to be able to do. When she was thirteen and started struggling with self-harm, DeGreve went to her teachers for help and they told her to either not talk about it or just pray. This inspired her mission to prevent this from happening to other people. DeGreve said that even though talking about mental health has improved, it still has a long way to go.
After introducing herself to us, she shared the story of how the Gray Matters Collective came to be. It was her junior year of college and she was sitting in the Brew by the Slough and she heard a group of students talking about mental health. She couldn’t help but eavesdrop, and she eventually joined in and they all talked about their experiences with mental health for a while. DeGreve then started to wonder why more people didn’t talk about mental health issues and decided she wanted to start working on that. That’s how the Gray Matters Collective began..
During the presentation, she asked the audience to raise their hands if they had a physical body. Everyone did. She then asked us to raise our hands again if we had physical health. All hands went back up. She then flipped it on us and asked if we all had a brain. Everyone raised their hands again. She then asked her most important question, if we all had mental health. This time some of the hands were a bit slow to rise back up. She stated that “you all have a brain, so you have mental health.” She wanted us to understand that even if you aren’t struggling with a mental illness, that we all have mental health to keep in check. This stood out to me since mental health talk is usually just about the worst of it. When talking about physical health, we usually talk about maintenance, while with mental health it’s more about the disorders. It is important for us to remember to take care of our minds and manage our thoughts even when we aren’t at our worst.
Later in the presentation DeGreve described the monumental moment where she had the first Gray Matters Collective meeting in Augustana’s own Gävle Rooms, the same room where we’d gathered for the presentation on Symposium Day. On the day the first meeting was held, only five people showed up at first. This was because that day of all days Augustana had a giant ice storm.
It was as if the world wanted people to come together to work through something hard, because this resulted in big groups of students meeting up to walk through that horrid storm. Those 5 people who originally showed up grew into a big group of 250 students who wanted to talk about mental health. DeGreve didn’t think many people wanted to talk about mental health but she still took a chance, and it turned out that people really did care for her mission. That other people also felt alone in their suffering. Those people could’ve decided there was no way they would go out into the storm for a meeting about mental health. But they did. Just like how DeGreve wanted people to come together to talk about mental health, they also came together to get through such a bad storm. Almost feels like fate.
Once the meeting started the big Gävle rooms were flooded with people. The 200 chairs that were there became overflown and people were sitting on the floor just to be a part of this. People got up and shared their stories about mental health, creating a safe space for everyone there. Usually the only people who were ‘supposed’ to talk about mental health were psychologists, but this event helped a very important voice speak out: youth voices.
After this meeting, DeGreve received something unexpected. It was a 5 page hand-written letter from a student who participated in the first Gray Matters Collective meeting. This student had been planning on committing suicide that same week, but he decided to go to this event and it changed many things for him. By hearing his peer’s stories about their own painful experiences, he realized he wasn’t alone. He realized that the other people around him would be devastated if he ever harmed himself, so he realized he needed to ask for help. He did. This student started therapy and is now a lawyer doing great things. If the Gray Matters meeting never happened, this student would have never realized that he and his struggles mattered.
Haley DeGreve learned that her mission meant something important, so she continued to work hard and watch her dream take flight. Her small thoughts blossomed into a very big, very necessary Big Idea.
Gray Matters Collective Website: https://thegraymatterscollective.com/
Gray Matters Collective Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegraymatterscollective/