The Sunday News
Emmanulla Chikuda, Eulaine Sigola and Kudzaishe Chibaya
NOT everyone in life has it going easy, so our generation has resorted to taking the perfect picture and trying to recreate it in their own little way to fit their world, just so they feel like they belong in it.
But it turns out life is not stagnant like a picture, it’s a moving process and is all about evolving.
What we fail to see as young people is how “the person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Albert Einstein was right by saying this, just because we see others on social media, in movies and in real life taking alcohol, drugs and claiming it is stress relieving and exciting we want to follow the crowd and do like they do.
We fail to see that soon all of that disappears and you are snapped back to reality, only to realise that you are back to square one and that assignment that was stressing you is still waiting there to be done, when you would have invested three hours of getting drunk and high.
At that time, you realise that getting over it and getting back on track into actually researching on the topic and mastering the concept is hard.
In life people tend to excuse the reasons behind why certain things happen, the question should be “why?” in order to find a resolution.
This is because it is scary to know that 65 percent of the patients attended to in our City of Bulawayo suffer from some form of mental disorder with drugs and 20-30 percent of these admitted are youths, and we have to take into consideration that these are recorded cases, what of the unrecorded ones and what does this mean for our future as the succeeding generation.
Some of the causes of drug and substance abuse amongst youths are lack of employment, peer pressure, breakdown of family support systems, limited knowledge on effects of drug abuse and depression as well as anxiety.
Effects of these drugs are detrimental to health, they are both long term and short term, physical health and mental health is risked by abusing drugs some of these effects are, liver damage, brain damage (when the brain is damaged it cannot be fixed), aggression, and violence.
Some of the solutions should be a national mandate on youth occupation, there is need for awareness campaigns, the drug master plan should be implemented effectively, more rehabilitation centres have to be created.
All in all a lot has to be done and youths have to acquire accessibility to more opportunities and platforms to create their own opportunities.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Accessibility ignites innovation thus alleviating substance and drug abuse among the youth, so as to grow our City and Country and achieve sustainable development goals number 1, 3, 8 and 9.
So instead of following the crowd it should be an intentional decision to choose your own path, face the challenges head on, to go for a better future than a fun never lasting a few hours and a disastrous, regrettable future. Let’s normalise making well informed choices.
Emmanulla Chikuda, Eulaine Sigola and Kudzaishe Chibaya are members of the Bulawayo Junior City Council.
