Anxiety and depression are prevalent in every high school across the nation, and WHS is no exception. With tests, quizzes and college applications to get done, stress is inescapable. Mental health is a huge problem among students, and it needs to be addressed, but are additional mental health days for students the way to do it?

According to Insider, Oregon now allows students to use “mental health days” as a valid excuse for an absence. The students who proposed the bill did so “to change the stigma around mental health in a state that has some of the highest suicide rates in the U.S.” Additionally, according to The New York Times, a similar law was passed in Utah in 2018, and according to CNN, a bill with a similar objective was proposed in New York in September.

At first, when I heard about these bills, I was excited by the idea of mental health being recognized as a valid excuse to miss school. I have had to take a few mental health days in high school myself, but they were registered as sick days. I felt guilty that I had to essentially lie in order to be excused because I was not physically sick. This is why students deserve the ability to choose whether or not to indicate if they are physically ill or suffering from stress.

While being able to indicate the reason for an absence would be valuable in the sense that it would let teachers know what was wrong, sick days and mental health days should not be considered separate entities. In addition, a mental health day can look different for every person who takes one. A student could need a day to completely escape from school, but another might need this day to study and feel more confident about upcoming assignments. No matter what that person does with their day off, the time away from school is valuable.

Students advocating for mental health days recognize the same problem I do; however, I see a different solution. There should be an option on sick days to indicate the cause of the absence. There should be a physically sick option and a mental health day option. This is because if these days were considered as separate reasons for an absence, students who use all of their designated mental health days would turn to using sick days instead.

The term “mental health day” itself has just become part of our vernacular within the past few years. Before that, mental health wasn’t even in the conversation as a possible reason for absence, both at school or in the workplace. The fact that this issue is even being addressed is a step in the right direction, but we need to put the proper procedure in place first.