I am guessing that you have been injured in some way at least once in your life and it was not very enjoyable. According to Oxford Languages the definition of an injury is sustaining damage to a tissue usually recognisable as swelling, redness, inflammation, bruising, and prevention of normal functioning. Physical injury is closely connected to mental health. Mental health problems make healing more difficult and lengthen the healing process. The combination of getting an injury and dealing with the stress of school may be too much to handle. Schools need to be more accommodating to students who get seriously injured.

Getting injured has a terrible impact on a person’s psychological health. Annina Lecapitaine, A SPASH junior comments on how she felt when she broke her collarbone “I felt depressed, I was locked up in my room and wasn’t able to move around that well.” This means that Aninna’s injury definitely affected her mental health; she was isolated and the incident made her feel devastated. injuries can reveal dormant mental health problems. The NCAA sports science institute says that, ”For some student-athletes, the psychological response to injury can trigger or unmask serious mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, disordered eating, and substance use or abuse.” This means that getting an injury can be the cause of many extremely serious mental health disorders. Even if an injury does not reveal a mental health disorder it will change your mood in a negative way. Everyone is different and everyone reacts to injury in different ways. Deacon Yang is a SPASH junior who strained his back last year. Deacon tells us that his injury made him feel left out and sad because it prevented him from doing many things he enjoyed like playing soccer. In other words Deacon’s injury prevented him from having fun which put him in a poor mood.

School is not easy and trying to do school with an injury makes it drastically more bothersome. School is the number one cause of stress in teens. High amounts of stress paired with the dejected mental state that comes with getting injured, is simply put as problematic. Relieving some of the stress by making school easier for students would create a better situation for focusing on healing the injury. From my personal experience of breaking my wrist, I can say that it does not feel great going into surgery wondering how missing a few days will affect my ability to pass my classes. School becomes a massive burden. Physically being at school is also not ideal for healing. Deacon says, “It was painful to sit… It was difficult to walk and it hurt.” In explanation, sitting in a rock hard school chair was excruciating and having to walk to every class was agonizing. Schools are not able to provide comfort for students.

Without doing schoolwork a student may fall behind. But, missing a few weeks or being excused from a couple of assignments will not make a student less intelligent. A few weeks of school does not turn a person into a genius. Keeping up with school work is not more important than the health of the students. The negatives of what can happen is not worth the positives. School decreases recovery times and destroys the mental health of an injured student. NCAA sports Science institute explains “Another problematic response to injury is depression, which magnifies other responses and can also impact recovery.” This says that by adding to factors that create depression school is lengthening recovery times for students that are trying to recover.

Mental health is very serious. If left alone without any help from school the worst can happen to students. ”Kenny McKinley, a wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in September 2010 after growing despondent following a knee injury,” according to the NCAA sports science institute. Kenny McKinley took his own life because he was struggling with mental health problems. Adding the stress that school causes to the mental health struggles that an injury causes can result in a catastrophe.

If you do get injured just know that you can get through it and everything will be alright. But, It would be nice if schools would help their students to get through the tough times in their lives.