Students celebrating Tourette's Awareness Day
To mark Tourette’s Awareness Day, some of our L2 Health and Social Care students have been raising awareness at our Forest of Dean campus this month.
Maisie Wood, who has Tourette’s Syndrome, and her friend Caitlin Lake, have worked hard over the last few weeks to bring their social action project to life.
Maisie said, “Nobody really knows much about Tourette’s Syndrome, and we’ve been doing this campaign to make people more aware of it. Lots of people think it’s just swearing and making rude gestures, trying to get attention, and it’s not. I was diagnosed when I was 9, and for a long time I felt like I had to hide it. It’s hard, it’s really tiring.
“I feel really comfortable in my group. They’re all lovely, they’re really nice. I told them about my Tourette’s and they’re really supportive with it.”
With the entire Health and Social Care class on board, they made posters and created amazing displays with umbrellas.
Caitlin explained, “We’ve been doing a campaign about Tourette’s Awareness. We were talking about how people can be open minded and used umbrellas to symbolise that. We got people to pledge their awareness and then tie it to the umbrellas, which we hung up on display.”
For the one thing that Maisie said she wants people to know, she said, “I want people to know to not be scared, to ask me questions. I’m happy to laugh about it sometimes. I don’t want people to be scared of me and I want people to realise Tourette's Syndrome isn’t this one thing where people swear or lash out – there’s more to it than that.”
What an inspiration! See some of the pictures:
