Elena Carritt, 9, is a Grade 3 student at St. Martin de Porress School in Red Deer and taking her school's focus on mental health and wellness issues one step further for the benefit of her peers and community.

By Sheldon Spackman

stress balls proving popular

Local student takes mental health and wellness initiative one step further

Jun 8, 2019 | 8:00 AM

A local Red Deer student has taken her school’s focus on mental health and wellness issues above and beyond the call of duty.

Elena Carritt, 9, is a Grade 3 student at St. Martin de Porres School. After learning about mental health and wellness with her classmates during Mental Health Awareness Month in May, she decided to take it upon herself to learn even more about the subject.

Following some additional research, Carritt began making stress balls to give to her friends.

“I wanted to put together a basket with a few of my stress balls in it to give away to one of the students for mental health,” she explains. “My mom thought it would be a good idea to ask businesses, so we started asking businesses if they would donate things that would help mental health. We got over 22 different prizes, then we drew them all at assembly.”

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Carritt who plans to do the initiative every year now, feels it’s important to always be yourself, respect who you are, and don’t be mean to yourself.

“Lots of people always say it’s important to be active or to be healthy and get good sleep,” reiterates Carritt. “But really, it just connects to how you’re treating your mental health and how that works. I hope to spread the word about mental health so that other people know to take care of their mental health and so that they can be happy and healthy too.”

Kristie McCullough, Assistant Principal at St. Martin de Porres School, says Carritt really connected with their initiatives on mental health and wellness.

“She was really interested when she came to the stress ball making session,” recalls McCullough. “She wanted to know more about what making a stress ball could do and how that relieves stress. Her research then went into finding out more about mental health and because of that, she came up with the idea for her plan to spread the prizes around to students and encourage them to take care of themselves mentally.”

McCullough says for someone of Carritt’s age to have so much intuition, insight and passion on the subject is very impressive.

“She approached over 20 businesses in Red Deer and she explained to them what her pillars of mental health were,” says McCullough. “She talked about proper exercise and diet and sleep and nutrition and relaxation. She talked about the pillars that are important to her and then asked them if they could donate anything that would then in-turn help those kids in our school community.”

McCullough says Carritt received over 22 donations for her efforts, including one-month unlimited yoga passes, massages, gardening kits and journals.

“I just think that for others to look to her and see what a leader she is at such a young age, I’m just very proud of her and how she’s taking her passion and going with it,” exclaims McCullough. “I just want to thank the community of Red Deer because they went above and beyond too. Sometimes you get a lot of ‘asks’ as someone who runs a business and she had a lot of people sit down and talk to her about this and then connect with her why they felt mental health was so important.”

“It just really is important no matter what age, we do need to take care of ourselves,” adds McCullough. “It takes a community to take care of you. You can’t do it by yourself.”