Celebration of Mines provides platform for new mental health club

At Celebration of Mines there were many sports booths with clubs including the Triathlon Club, Running Club, Karate Club and Shooting Sports Club. However, there was a slightly more obscure club, Active Minds at Mines, present Friday. This club is a not only focused on physical health, but on mental health as well.

Along with getting new members as a first year club, they are also looking to emphasize the connection between physical health and psychological health.

According to Travis Canney, the director and founder of Active Minds at Mines, the goal of the club in its first year is to get established on campus as much as possible.

“The biggest thing is to just start the conversation about mental health, which is the whole idea behind the club,” Canney said. “We want to reach out to connect all the members of Mines from freshmen to PhD. students to even faculty with our counseling center and all the different resources on campus for them. We want to start making it okay to talk about mental health and stop making it such a strange and weird thing to talk about.”

It is no secret that high amounts of stress is very common for students at School of Mines which can easily slide into deeper problems. Fitness is one way to combat this.

“Health and fitness is very important to our club. Here at Mines, it’s definitely a struggle with all our stress and everything else. Essentially, we want everyone to be able to survive at this school and get through it. We’re here for people to come and talk and we’ll actually listen. People can feel free to openly talk about what they have. We’re here to direct them so that way ultimately they’re okay mentally and they can go ahead and get through it,” states Canney. The new club has some events to look out for in the near future.

“Our first event is suicide prevention month. It starts September 10th which is National Suicide Prevention Day and will go all the way to October 9th which is National Day without Stigma,” Canney said. “We are going to go ahead and do a couple events and have a couple tables to just kind of get people to notice it on campus. Some other things we want to do are bring guest speakers to campus through MAC and Res Life and work with other organizations to bring everyone together for this and open it up to the campus.”