Freeze the Ice Bucket Challenge

Every time I opened Instagram, like muscle memory, I found myself clicking on the first story I saw. “Thank you to so-and-so for nominating me for the USC Speak Your Mind Ice Bucket Challenge. I’m nominating X, Y, and Z. You have 24 hours.” Over a short period of time, this script was repeated, followed by an icy gasp and some exclamation of profanity. This was the trend that absorbed all my Instagram screen time the past week, much to my dismay. My messages were filled with “I’m nominating you!” or “Can I nominate you? I’m desperate.” I took embarrassing screenshots of all of my friends, and although I didn’t participate, I enjoyed seeing people embarrass themselves on their Instagram stories more than I should admit. 

Soon, the words University of South Carolina (USC) Speak Your Mind Challenge became common in teenage vocabulary, but like many other fads, I lacked real knowledge of what they truly meant. I knew the challenge was to raise awareness for a cause. When I asked my friends who participated what it was for, I was often met with “Idk” or “mental health.” But those answers—certainly the former—didn’t seem sufficient. When people were sacrificing their good hair days and catching a cold for a cause, it felt as though we should at least know what the challenge was raising awareness for. 

The USC Speak Your Mind Challenge originated from the University of South Carolina’s “Mental Illness Needs Discussion” club. The club was founded to normalize discussing mental health and to advocate for the prevention of suicide. The USC Speak Your Mind Challenge embodied the club’s goals in an attempt to destigmatize mental health issues by being open about mental health online and raising money for suicide prevention. The challenge took the world by storm, with people from all corners of the globe participating. It was surreal for me to see my family-friends from my time in London and my Westchester camp friends somehow doing the same viral challenge. It was the definition of a small world. 

But the concept of an ice bucket challenge didn’t start for mental health awareness. After stumbling upon a TikTok of Taylor Swift and Jamie King participating with a group of fans, I soon learned that it actually originated from a trend in 2014. The concept of an ice bucket challenge began with three young men with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Pete Frates, Pat Quinn, and Anthony Senerchia, all of whom are deceased from the terminal disease. The disease is characterized by slowly deteriorating and then killing motor neurons, causing slow paralysis until your body simply lacks function, with no cure. So, originally, the ice bucket challenge was attributed with changing the course of ALS research and making it a household name. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised an estimated $115 million for ALS research and awareness. Although the disease is still not preventable or curable, the challenge sparked hope and advocacy for the community. 

Before the USC Speak Your Mind Challenge, anyone who was on any social media platform in 2014 associated the Ice Bucket Challenge with ALS. When I brought up my nominations at the dinner table, both my parents said something along the lines of: “Oh wow! The ALS one? I can’t believe it’s back!” When I brought up my hesitation to do the challenge to my camp friends (and my nominators), I was met with “It’s for mental health. You support that, right?” I watched in real time as the ice bucket challenge got torn even further from the ALS community and cause.

The USC Speak Your Mind Challenge unintentionally but ultimately diminishes the original cause it was made for: ALS. When the next generation associates the ice bucket challenge with suicide prevention and not ALS, it decreases awareness of the disease and the power that the original ice bucket challenge had for this terminal illness. The ice bucket challenge changed how the world thinks about and understands ALS; when the ice bucket challenge was repurposed, it marked a step back, not forward, for the disease. 

However, the ALS Association’s Instagram tried to make the two go hand in hand. To nostalgic audios with a caption dubbing the resurfacing a “butterfly effect,” it seemed as though perhaps two very important conversations—about mental health and ALS—could share the stage. But this only existed on my corner of the internet, and to my dismay, multiple friends who participated in the challenge this year didn’t even know what ALS was. Brooke Eby, a content creator who talks about her life living with ALS, summed up this feeling perfectly in a recent post: “Watching people steal the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for a different cause when ALS doesn’t have a cure and is 100 percent fatal. Fuming.” 

I recently clicked on the USC Mind page. It had 866,000 followers—a startling amount for a college club. I was taken aback. We only shared four followers. That couldn’t be right. I opened my Photos app, scrolling up to the screenshot I had taken when I first had the idea for this article. Between that screenshot and now, 23 of my friends have unfollowed the USC Mind account as the trend slowly moved into different states and across oceans. The challenge that was for mental health and awareness and creating real change had changed nothing—it had left our minds and our following list as if it was barely there in the first place. 

This is the fate that activism has faced in the modern age of social media. To everyone who set up their phones to record their very own video, it was easier to think that we were doing the right thing in posting it. It was easier to think that we were inspiring change in our little corner of the globe. To us teenagers, it wasn’t about mental health. It was about bragging about the number of nominations we’d gotten, who nominated us, and the screenshots and stickers of participants used as new friend group memes. In the hundreds of challenge videos I saw, three linked a webpage to donate. It was, in essence, what practically everything in our adolescence is about: fitting in. If participating in the challenge took away from the one beacon of hope for the 30,000 Americans living with one of the worst diagnoses you can get, did it even inspire change for mental health? 

The reemergence of the Ice Bucket Challenge poses a dangerous question for us as we grow up on social media: to what extent can we actually support a cause? Can we support it when it’s actively taking away from another cause? Are we showing support by only vaguely understanding its meaning and purpose? And, are we showing support when we only do the challenge if enough of our friends have? 

The USC Speak Your Mind Challenge is estimated to have raised 370,000 dollars for mental health awareness. Although I don’t believe that the challenge was done by most for the right reasons, or even for the right cause, this number does offer hope. When thousands of teenagers band together to do something, it makes noise. It can make change. 

So, when there’s inevitably another time for our generation to wield power, we need to take advantage of it. We need to wield that power by not diminishing others and wield this power genuinely. While that might look different for everyone, it can start small. Learn about the cause you’re supporting. Donate or just link to donate when you post something. Don’t forget about a cause that meant so much to the world mere days after it’s done. We can make change. But real change comes from making change the right way.