Episode 12: Keona Discusses Mental Health and Substance Abuse

Welcome back to Project Outsiders! If you are returning, thank you so much for coming back and tuning into our podcast. We really appreciate all of  your support and joining us along on our journey to improving the foster care system. For those who are new here, Welcome to the Foster Care Experience Podcast. We are a youth lead social organization that is trying to bridge the gap between youth in care with decision makers. We are all youth from care who have been pushed by our experience to ensure we see changes to a disconnected system. We are all incredibly passionate advocates and activists and want to create paths and opportunities for youth in care.

In today's conversation we want to talk about mental health and the use of substances. For a lot of youth in care that is the number one tool we would resort to as a way to cope with our situation. It is not often that we have people in our life that are able to teach us healthy coping skills so we go with the ones taught to us by our peers who are also struggling. This becomes a complicated cycle to get out of once it has been habituated into your daily routine. When mental health becomes more of an issue the more easy it is for youth to fall deeper into an addiction. There are a lot of stigmas that come with having an addiction and today we want to learn more about how to prevent and overcome them. Here to tell us about her journey overcoming a global pandemic is Keona Sehmi.

(Keona’s Bio)

Keona Sehmi is a first voice advocate and participates in numerous committees as a youth advisor. Some of the committees she sits on includes the youth for change steering committee with OACAS, youth said through Halton CAS, She is an advisor for OACAS covid-19 mental health toolkit, and she is a peer mentor for the futures life skills and mentorship program. She plans to take a year off after she graduates for self growth and recovery, but plans to go to school for nursing to become a psychiatric nurse at mohawk.

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