Optimising health – our experience

Transcript

Raja: Like this spring brought up in a negative environment like that, that I did like find myself quite a homophobic, racist young person, which is ironic, like, now looking at me, but, I was honestly just a product of my environment, and I didn't know any better, because, like, that was the home environment, and the school environment, and the community environment, so. But I did kind of like start realising that maybe maybe I do like girls a bit more than I actually think. I thought the whole world was ending. It was like no, I've like spent all this time thinking they're bad people and like just being horrible about it because I like a I didn't understand it and they had like just been told all these uneducated terrible things about people so I just had this real complex about identifying as Aboriginal and then identifying as, like, queer, because they were two things that I've been told my whole life were bad.

Ash: It, like, made me anxious to interact with other people. It made me not want to talk to parents about it, especially, it made me distrust people's parents. Like, I thought, like, maybe my friends will get it, but their parents will never, and I'm just not going to talk to them about it. Like, I think... at the school that I was at at that time, that, on top of being at that school, on top of like, not really fitting in, not really being able to talk to anyone about it, like, made me just like, super sad all the time, and that all affected my social anxiety because it was like, people don't like me, like, I've seen somebody's already called me into question means that I feel uncomfortable talking to really anybody anymore That I don't know that I don't already have like a really deep connection with so I think it kind of just Like all of it adds up to kind of make it really difficult mental health wise.

Ewen: If you're taking this journey alone, you've got a lot more, dark room moments where you're sort of sitting in a room thinking, oh, this is me and I'm not, I'm not part of the society anymore and all that sort of stuff. And that could probably turn a child down the wrong path of bad mental health, I guess. Whereas having a support mechanism in there from both inside the family and also through, societal means, I guess, is that the child is feeling supported in society and where there is problems with certain aspects of their, say, day to day life or their job or their school, they know that there is a part of society that is accepting of this and understands.

Raja: I think I'd still be, like, in the closet to be honest. If I didn't have community around me, I don't know where I would be. Because they, they're the people that have, like, given me the support and given me the time of day to sit down and talk about things that I've needed to and taking a holistic approach means you encompass everything in their life. Like, not singling out things like just their sexuality or just their gender. Or, just their like, cultural identity, because they're like a billion intersections and it just complicates it if you're trying to take out like a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It's like, the best way, that's gonna be the best for the young person and, I don't know if it's gonna be easier for the person, like the doctor or whoever it is, but like, holistic approaches are everything.