BOARDMAN — After overcoming her own battles with mental illness, a local teacher is using art to open up the discussion on mental health with her students.

Glenwood Junior High art teacher Chelsea Wisbar started doing an art project this year with her eighth-grade students that teaches them about their own brain development while breaking down the stigma of mental illness.

“Knowing the way the brain works is so important, and these kids don’t know anything about that,” Wisbar said. “Their brain at this age is going through so many different things.”

While mental health has always been important to her, she didn’t have the idea to turn it into a student project until she spoke with the school’s guidance counselors.

“Mental health has always been an important thing to me because I have personally struggled with a lot of issues and mental health problems,” Wisbar said. “I never really turned it into a project, but when talking to the guidance counselors, they were just like, ‘You know, there’s so many issues going on with these kids; there’s aggression, there’s this, there’s that.'”

Wisbar has the students start the project by choosing a mental illness or disorder they want to research. She encourages them to pick something that is relatable to them. Last nine weeks, a student chose Autism Spectrum Disorder because her brother is on it.

“If you do something that’s either based on yourself or one of your family members, you’re going to have way more of an emotional connection with it,” Wisbar said.

The students then write an artist’s statement explaining why they picked their selection. Next, they draw a “healthy” brain, and from there, they add elements to visually represent the mental illness or disorder.

Wisbar recruited help this week to expand on her class topic of mental health. On Wednesday, she brought in a guest lecturer, Shawn Coss, a self-described “dark art” artist. Coss spoke with the students about dealing with his own depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, and how he expresses that in his art.

On Thursday, she brought in Alta Behavioral Healthcare art therapy clinic supervisor and program coordinator Heidi Larew to do an art therapy exercise with the students. Larew had the students tear pieces of tissue paper and place them on a sheet of paper before dampening the tissue paper with water. When the tissue paper was removed, an abstract art piece was revealed. Larew said she chose the project to give the students a chance to relax and unwind while expressing themselves.

“If you’re someone who is really tight and constricted in your emotional expression, it can help you loosen up, it’s adaptable,” Larew said.

Larew said that art is a great form of therapy for pre-teens due to its forgiving nature and the feeling of accomplishment it gives.

“The feeling of acceptance is really important when you’re in junior high; your body’s changing, your mind’s changing,” Larew said. “It’s really nice to be able to come back to creativity and art materials that are forgiving, you can make a mistake and start over again, and you can make something beautiful and have a sense of mastery.”

Wisbar has spoken to the students before about her own struggles growing up with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, anxiety and depression. Wisbar remembers growing up without the resources available today and the challenges it brought. She hopes that by sharing her story with her students and encouraging them to take mental health seriously, she can help her students in ways that she wasn’t when she was their age.

“Even if I only impact one or two kids, my job’s done. I’m cool with that,” Wisbar said.