This Valley Life: Student speakers advocate for change
Earlier this week, Dublin High School senior Annie Arcuri stood in front of more than 90 people at a regional Rotary breakfast in Livermore and shared a story about her older brother, Louis. “I lost my older brother to schizophrenia,” she said into the microphone, stepping away from the safety of the lectern. “He had been a straight-A student, a star athlete, but he became lost to an illness that no one wants to talk about.” Arcuri, who was competing with five other local high school students in the Rotary’s annual speech contest, encouraged her listeners to recognize that schizophrenia is a mental illness that needs treatment just like any other medical condition.
“Years ago, some people would point and laugh at disabled people,” she said in an interview after the contest. “We don’t do that anymore, and we shouldn’t be labeling people with mental illness as insane or keeping schizophrenia hushed up.”
Arcuri noted that 1 percent of the population will be diagnosed with schizophrenia at some point in their lives.
“This means that four students in my graduating class this year at Dublin High School will have this illness,” she said. “Think about that.”
Her speech took first place, but other students also gave exceptional speeches on topics including the need to aid homeless veterans, to find cures for cancer and AIDS, to provide scholarships that change lives, or to simply take time to perform acts of kindness.
“If every Rotarian in the world did one random act of kindness every day,” Amador Valley High School junior Jenna Martin said, “we could reach millions of people and change society, one life at a time.”
Second-place finisher, Shri Gandhi, also a junior at Amador, shared his story of helping build schools in a remote region of India when he was 8.
“I remember asking myself why we would come to this remote area where the temperature was 110 degrees,” he said. “I found my answer in the smiles of the children we were helping.”
Competing with Arcuri, Martin and Gandhi were Neema Monfared of Foothill High School, Luke Lalor of Livermore High and Melody Molander of Granada High.
All six had previously taken first place in a speech contest at the six individual Rotary clubs in the Tri-Valley.With Arcuri’s first-place regional win, she advances to the district competition April 7 in San Jose. That winner will receive $1,000.
While each contestant gave effective speeches, judges found Arcuri’s message and delivery the most compelling. Afterward, she spoke of her brother, who was 24 when he ended his life.
“My brother didn’t commit suicide in the usual sense,” Arcuri said. “He hadn’t been depressed or thinking about taking his life.”
She explained that Louis often heard voices in his mind, and that he was an impulsive person who obsessed about religion. At one point, for six months he received successful treatment and returned to college, but he soon fell victim again to the illness.
Arcuri recalled that one night, in an effort to fend off evil, he stayed overnight in a church. Both she and her mother, Katy, who was with her at the contest, say these voices instructed Louis to take impulsive action that caused his death in October 2008.
Arcuri’s message is simple: Mental illness is treatable, and it’s a condition from which no one should ever again have to die.
Written by Jim Ott, Contra Costa Times.
