Hi, my name is Chloe Nelson. I am 22 years old and a current student at St. Charles Community College working towards my associate in general education of psychology. The big question of this essay is how has your experience with mental health influenced your beliefs, relationships, and career aspirations? Well for me, I personally struggle with a few different mental health conditions myself. I am diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, general anxiety, major depression, and social anxiety. I have had a roller coaster of a ride from pre-diagnosis to now. I was twelve years old when I first started experiencing symptoms of bi-polar disorder and anxiety due to a house fire my family and I had experienced in 2013. At this time, I started to self-harm and self-medicate to numb the emotions I was feeling although that only worked for so long. By the time I was fifteen I had started to realize things were getting out of hand because the self-harm and self-medicating were no longer working, and I was starting to feel suicidal. I reached out for help and got my first psychiatrist and therapist. This is the point in my story where we go on a long road of medications and misdiagnosis. I was initially diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. Next was the anxiety diagnosis. At the age of seventeen I had tried upwards of twenty different medications and been to a mental health hospital twice. This is the point that my mother decided it was time to switch psychiatrists and when we did things changed completely. I finally got the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder removed from my list because it was not a correct diagnosis. I was also placed on a medication that changed my whole life and that I am still on to this day, the medication being Vraylar which is an antipsychotic medication. The whole time with my previous psychiatrist I was always put on anti-depressants which didn’t work for my brain chemistry or genetic makeup. My latest diagnosis came this year in 2023, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder due to the house fire that happened when I was thirteen years old, my drug abuse due to self-medication, a car accident I was a part of in 2020, and a abusive relationship I had that same year. This finally brought my mental health journey full circle and gave me a sense of relief. Now I am 22 years old and working on my associate in general education of psychology in hopes to transfer to UMSL and work on my bachelor’s in psychology for Child Advocacy. My biggest passion right now would be to work with adolescents who have mental health and drug abuse crisis’s. The reasoning for this is because I believe that every child needs someone who not only knows what to do for them in a medical perspective to get them the care, they need but they also need someone who understands what they are going through and can advocate for them and have a shared perspective of what they are going through to be more empathetic. Thank you for your time reading my essay submission, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about my mental health journey and how it has shaped my career aspirations, beliefs, and relationship with mental health. If you decide to pick me for the scholarship, I can assure you that it will be going towards a good cause for me to be one step closer to assisting the adolescents of our society’s future in living happy, healthy, drug-free life.