Mental Health
Mentors in every school, starting in Loreto
Anamim Aracelli Sanchez Brito, an International Relations student at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, is building a youth mental health campaign in Loreto with partner organisations and three partner schools.
The plan starts with a batch of future mentors in their schools. From there, Anamim Aracelli Sanchez Brito and her team want the help to multiply, through alliances with schools and organisations and through the mentors' own acquaintances, until there is a whole network of young people in Loreto, Peru, committed to mental health.
They have worked on partnerships with organisations from the region, among them Bitacora Global, which she founded with Angel Adriano Vizcarra Salas and Li Adriano Chu Ochoa. On the school side they have coordinated partnerships with three schools, including the one she attended.
“Make sensitivity and empathy your superpower”
Anamim Aracelli Sanchez Brito
"We work in this project because we care about our community's mental health," she says. According to the statistics she cites, Loreto is one of the regions with the highest suicide figures and the lowest ratio of psychologists to students in its schools.
She is from Iquitos. She calls it "La Isla Bonita". Before that she lived in Lima, where she was "quite shy" with a small circle of friends. In Iquitos that changed. "It's a very warm city in every sense of the word," she says. "The weather is hot and people are always willing to help."
Even so, she says, the city faces challenges, and one of them is the mental health of its young people. Some time ago a close friend of hers attempted suicide. "When I found out, I helped her in every way I could, but I regretted not realizing it sooner," she says. Looking at the statistics, she saw it was not an isolated problem.
"I've never let age hold me back," she says. She has faced emotional problems of her own, and she says Iquitos healed her through the friends she made. Now she is looking to do something, "creating spaces where this problem diminishes more and more."
She and her team handle the digital promotion, the documents needed to carry out the project and the help received from other organisations. "We aim to start by little, but to let this project multiply so the help never ends and grows instead," she says.