USC Speak Your Mind Challenge: Helpful or Harmful? 

Because we live in a society that relies on social media so much it is natural for trends to occur and for people to want to join in on them. But not all of the trends that cycle through our phones are good for us to participate in. One of the recent trends that has taken off in the last month falls into this category. During these past few weeks, you may have seen your friends pour a bucket of ice water over their heads on their Instagram stories. 

Some of you might remember a similar trend a few years ago called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people poured ice water over their heads to raise money for ALS. A big difference between this challenge and the new one however is that ALS was seen more globally and had more people participate of all different kinds. Whereas this challenge is more so just known by teens and takes place on social media. 

This new trend was started by the University of Southern California and is called the USC Speak Your Mind Challenge where they encouraged people to pour a bucket of cold water over their heads and tag 3 friends to also participate, the goal of this was to raise money and awareness for mental health and break some of the stereotypes that are still present in people struggling with mental health. This was the goal….but not the outcome.  

Although the intention of this challenge was helpful the execution turned out to be more hurtful. One of the stereotypes that people with mental health are faced with and that the challenge tries to bring attention to is the idea that people who are struggling are just feeling that way for attention. We know this is not true as these are feelings that any person would happily get rid of if they could, but this harmful stereotype still causes mental health to be dismissed to this day. The big focus of this trend was to bring awareness and funds to support mental health but also to break stereotypes. However instead of erasing these stereotypes they cemented them. 

A big problem with this challenge and the ALS challenge for that matter is that once something is as big of a challenge as these have been its meaning can start to be lost along the way. The majority of the people who participated in this new challenge didn’t know what they were raising awareness for and why which upset many people who were struggling with mental health because this defeats the whole purpose of the challenge. 

These are the main reasons that I believe the USC Speak Your Mind Challenge is harmful. The goal was to encourage people who are struggling to speak up when they need help but instead know if someone were to speak up people would say “You’re just speaking up to get attention”. This reinforced the harmful stereotypes that they were trying to break. This along with the fact that a lot of the people participating don’t know or don’t care about what the ice bucket challenge is raising awareness for furthers these harmful ideas. 

Although I do not think that it was anyone who participated intended to create this destructive challenge, and most people just wanted to join in on a challenge they got tagged in by a friend but that is exactly the danger of these types of challenges because the message can get lost so quickly. So I encourage you the next time you want to participate in a new trend think about what message you are putting out there for the cause.