Among growing awareness about the possible damage social media can do to the mental health of children and teenagers, one Wasatch County High School student has a message: Don’t overlook the positive applications that can come through social networks. The student has worked for the past several years to maintain the Wasatch Kindness Instagram page, a profile that promotes positive messages and, more importantly, allows students a way to find peer support and connect with professionals when they find themselves struggling.And as they prepare to graduate at the end of the year, the student plans to pass the page along to another and is working with local nonprofit Wasatch Community Foundation to the Wasatch Kindness Service Scholarship to help soon-to-graduate seniors who help other students and leave positive impacts on their communities.The student, who asked to remain unnamed given their anonymous position running the page and responding to messages, said they first started Wasatch Kindness during their sophomore year when they were struggling with their own mental health.“I saw this need that ‘Hey, there’s the school counselors, but in a sense, I don’t feel like my problem is big enough to go talk to them,’” they said. “I was like, ‘Well, what if there’s a way for just someone at school to reach out to someone else and they can at least get another perspective, if not help from other peers.’”From the beginning, they explained, the idea was of course to still refer people to professional counselors for serious problems. But in cases of the less serious but still very real concerns kids face every day — fitting in, relationship woes, issues with friendships — the page would provide a shoulder kids could lean on, one where they could anonymously share their concerns with a peer the same age with similar concerns.If somebody wants to talk, they can go to the Instagram account and either send a message directly or click on a link in its bio that sends them to a screen where they can choose to message the account anonymously or find other resources through the Wasatch Community Foundation website, including the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number, 988. “You’ll see it everywhere, and everyone says that social media is bad, and in a way I do agree,” the student said. “But when someone isn’t feeling the best mentally, then they are going to go somewhere where it kind of takes their mind off of it, and for a lot of people that is social media.”Following that logic, the student realized that they could meet struggling peers where they would likely be — scrolling through feeds and hoping to push their problems out of their minds.And, while they said it happens less often than it used to, they said they point someone to talk to a professional once every two weeks or so. They have a school counselor’s number ready for when they need it.Their work to form a scholarship started earlier this year after one of the officials with Wasatch Community Foundation reached out through an anonymous Facebook post and said the nonprofit group would be interested in helping the student’s Wasatch Kindness initiative. “The idea is to put it towards someone that is pretty selfless. They just oftentimes will just do things for others to help them as much as they can,” they said. “A lot of the times when you do that, you’re not necessarily rewarded.”The student said this makes the scholarship an award for the kids whose kind acts often go unseen and an incentive for others to start being kinder.In order to be awarded the scholarship, applicants need to attend Wasatch County High School, be nominated by the student body, write an essay about their acts of kindness, and receive at least one letter of recommendation.People or businesses interested in supporting the scholarship can find more information and a place to submit their donations at Wasatch Community Foundation’s website.The post Wasatch County High School student seeks to promote and support kindness appeared first on Park Record.