Are KAS Clubs Prioritizing Image Over Core Values?

Opinion by Julia Chang, Grade 10

The start of the lovely school year of 2025 brings many new opportunities, one of the most exciting being the clubs. One of the best points of KAS is how easy it is to make a club. However, perhaps the recent crackdown has not been enough for certain clubs to shape up to the core values of the school: inclusivity, especially of emotional well-being.

The Psych Club was, in their own words, created to help spread awareness on mental health topics, and their mission is to focus on one topic per month, to help bring light to these lesser-known issues. Their statement for September, which was Suicide Prevention month, was “it’s okay not to be okay.” 

Aside from the obvious cliche phrase already leaving a bad taste in the mouth for how half-hearted it may seem, what really stood out to me was the final remarks during the first club meeting of the year. What started with a plea for members to help the club gain popularity had turned into something far more prejudicial than I would have expected.

The club leader, with full conviction, had said to the entire club: “Please tell people that you are part of the Psych Club, but don’t tell them that you are depressed. It makes our club look bad.” This was immediately met with laughter across the room, but it struck a nerve within me. 

Yes, you can call me squeamish, but I struggle to fathom how this speech and all of the club’s recent activities were not hypocritical in their execution to their supposed good intentions stated mere moments before. There is nothing wrong with wanting a good reputation for a club, but this i s just not the way to go about things. 

First off, depression is already an extremely stigmatized mental illness that often comes with the stereotypes of unstable, violent people or drug addicts, et cetera. The fact that the club leader addresses depression with a sense of detachment and shame only further heightens the problem, which goes against all the “bringing light to social issues” mission they had stated mere moments earlier.

Second of all, having to hide part of yourself to blend in with a group is extremely polarizing and alienating for any club member who might struggle with depressive thoughts. This was not only a shaky move for such a new club that is still fostering camaraderie, but it can be downright counted as bullying in the sense that students may be forced into submission as they do not want to disobey club authorities or stand out, even if they are already struggling with seeking help and coming to terms with their mental issues.

Lastly, for the entirety of the club meeting, the club leader had explained how they wanted to talk about mental conditions in an informative way, but never highlighted any specific way to do so. Their “pick-a-side” activity, hosted a short time later, was lackluster and had no meaningful conclusion (it was quite literally a photo opportunity with a board to make it look like they were actively participating with the rest of the school population for the club’s Instagram page), and to this day, there are still no results on the promises they delivered, which could have simply been addressed with social media posts.

They never even brought up their “it’s okay not to be okay” motto again or bothered to explain any thought process behind the already washed-through phrase; the phrase been around social media so much it is not only corny and unoriginal but also thoughtless, and their lack of explanation for it only heightens my suspicions that it was made in the heat of the moment rather than after careful brainstorming.

In the end, this isn’t even a question for only Psych Club, but for “club culture” in KAS as a whole. Are we really promoting the values that each club says to stand for, or do the actions and events present themselves as more shallow and cursory (say, for example, with only the intent of filling a gap on a college application) than truly helpful?