Why mental health REALLY matters

As a future psychology student, I've been seeing how stress affected my whole class.

For context, we're in our last year of highschool, this year in Argentina is the best year ever, in our province we have this thing called "Presentación de buzos", where you basically have to prepare a choreography of around 10-15 minutes (which literally takes months to do it and practice it) with different songs and a main theme to show everyone your hoodie (that we also get to choose the design of it to wear it the whole year). This might seem like it's not so deep, but it has removed the cultural weight, it puts so much pressure on students and it's crazy. Everyone wants it to be perfect, from the design of the hoodie to the day of the presentation, all of this is so big that it probably takes around a year to set everything.

What I think it's crazy it's that collectively we begin to present somatizations of stress. 

In my case, I got sick twice in a month and terrible back pain, besides the psychological emotional distress. My classmates felt incredibly drained and depressed after it.

My conclusion probably is that, to me, the cultural impact that something so little has on us is incredible, even when we try for it to not affect us so deeply.

I don't know if any of this has so much sense.