USC Ice Bucket Challenge Spread

“Most people who are doing it—it’s performative; they’re just doing it because their friends are doing it. They’re mostly just doing it because it’s a trend right now, rather than spreading mental health awareness. I didn’t participate in it, but [the people doing the trend] could have at least included a link to educate people on what it was for.” —Sarah Zhang, junior 

“I thought the trend was fun at first, and it reminded me a lot of a similar one for ALS that went viral years ago. It did get annoying after a while, though, because the ice bucket videos took over my entire feed, repeating the same lines over and over again. I also think the challenge strayed from its original purpose of raising awareness about mental health, since most participants did it just to join in on the trend.” —Audrey Jing, junior 

“I did the USC Ice Bucket Challenge after getting nominated by a few close friends of mine. The challenge itself is for support of mental health awareness; however, dumping water really has no effect on such awareness, so I believe it was kind of useless. I did NOT enjoy dumping water over my own head; however, for mental health, it is what it is.” —Muya Zhou, freshman  

“Although I did the challenge (albeit shamefully), I really think that the challenge isn’t about mental health at all. I see people pouring water over their heads, essentially laughing and making a mockery of the tragic event, not bringing any awareness to the actual challenge and forgetting the very reason the club was started. I feel bad about doing the challenge; I should have tried to instead talk about what actually happened.” —Sasha Silakov, freshman 

“I saw everyone giggling about the challenge, so I figured it was only to shock your mind and wake you up. But recently, I was talking about it with my friend and she mentioned it being tragic. I asked, ‘What are you talking about?,’ and she said, ‘You know the challenge started because someone killed themself?’ My jaw dropped! I feel that this is an issue that should’ve gained more awareness, even in USC MIND’s original post promoting the challenge.” —Yubin Li, freshman 

 “I find it very encouraging. Many people do not take mental health seriously, so the fact that the people doing the Ice Bucket Challenge are willing to go to such lengths to raise awareness is truly inspiring.” —Humayra Bhuiyan, freshman

“The Ice Bucket Challenge was such a creative and effective way to spread awareness and raise funds for important research. It’s being spread by social media, which is nearly unlimited in how much attention it brings. Although I did not personally participate in the challenge, I was definitely aware of how big it was—lots of people on my Instagram feed were dunking ice buckets on their heads.” —Chloe Chu, freshman 

“When I first saw the Ice Bucket Challenge showing up on everyone’s feed, I was pretty uninterested because I didn’t really want to take the time to repost a bunch of stories where people nominated me. It seemed kind of dumb and like it had ‘devolved’ from the original challenge. I think the original challenge, which was in 2014, was more fun because you would share it on older apps like Facebook, which were more communal and held less pressure than apps like Instagram and Snapchat now. I think that the challenge is fun, but the way it’s being spread nowadays feels more cliquey and less about having fun.” —Paloma Wilkinson, freshman 

“Honestly, the challenge itself was fun, but it felt less like raising awareness and more of jumping on the newest trend. As much as it did give the MIND club at USC popularity and encourage donations to Active Minds, it felt like the majority of people didn’t know the specifics behind their mental health campaign and how they wanted to destigmatize mental health and prevent suicide. The Ice Bucket Challenge could also make people feel more isolated because they never got nominated and had that peer pressure of ‘Oh, all my classmates and friends are doing it and I still haven’t gotten nominated.’ It’s almost going against their mental health.” —Kayla Wang, junior 

“I feel like the Ice Bucket Challenge was more of a thing people were doing because it was trending, and their friends were doing it too. Although it allowed people to feel more included, I think it drifted people apart from the reason it actually started. I got curious as to how it began and learned that it was to raise money and awareness for people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Instead of raising money, it allowed people to follow a trend and have fun trying something new.” —Isha Rashid, sophomore 

“I felt like most people were doing it for the trend rather than doing it to try and spread mental health awareness. I think this was really clear when people started off the challenge by saying that it was the Ice Bucket Challenge instead of the speak your mind challenge.” —Anjum Lama, junior 

“I feel like this adaptation of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is kind of insensitive towards the original ALS Ice Bucket Challenge because it just kind of feels like a bad replacement. It shouldn’t be a replacement. ALS is a syndrome that has a loss of muscle control, and the ice being poured onto people's heads was supposed to stimulate that loss of muscle control, whereas for the USC Speak Your Mind challenge, there’s really no connection with the ice.”—Alice Dan, senior 

“I don’t see them talking about mental health, so to me it’s just like a challenge. It’s not that deep; I genuinely don’t see how putting ice on someone’s head is related to mental health, especially if they don’t even talk about it.”—Aditi Anima, junior 

“I think that the actual meaning behind the challenge, raising awareness for ALS, is really sweet, but among teenagers it is just a trend where you nominate your friends. It isn’t harmful, but I think the goal is to get people to donate, which doesn’t seem to happen often—at least in our age group.”—Amy Mitchneck, sophomore 

“It’s interesting how many people did it. There are a lot of trends people refuse to do, but so many people did this one. It was also nice how it was brought back from 10 years ago.” —Ziv Barel, sophomore 

“It was shocking because it was the first time I’ve seen so many people’s Instagram stories be the same thing, and I was a little confused at first. But I did some research and it was for a noble cause; I respect it.” —Ronghe Guo, sophomore 

“I believe that the message behind doing the Ice Bucket Challenge got lost, and soon people just started doing it to do it. At a certain point people even stopped tagging USC Mind. It just became performative, and the translation was lost.”—Serenity Dingwall, junior 

“Although dumping ice water on myself was annoying, I really admired what the challenge stood for because it brought awareness to mental health. Having a space to express your inner thoughts is critical, because otherwise everything will bottle up and eventually explode. Hopefully people can create more safe spaces so that more people can have their mental health needs met.”—Hayley Geoghegan, sophomore 

“ I personally found the USC Ice Bucket Challenge funny since everyone did it, but at the same time the message for mental health awareness wasn’t really emphasized besides one post by a senior. I thought it was a good community building exercise of sorts, since everyone I know engaged in it.”—Ivan Huang, sophomore 

“It was very much a ‘it’s a small world moment’—I saw my friends in different countries and states awkwardly dumping water on themselves just as I did, and it definitely brought about a sense of connection and community. I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that most people took it out of the context of mental health and ignored the point of the challenge, but I think ignoring deeper messages is somewhat inevitable on the internet; the challenge was extremely successful in bringing more attention to mental health than there was before, so I don’t think it was unsuccessful or harmful in that regard. One thing I will say is the challenge lent itself easily to exclusion; there was definitely a feeling of stress over getting nominated or not getting nominated by many people. I was stressed about excluding people, so I ended up nominating more than 15 people.”—Maxanne Wallace-Segall, sophomore 

“I’m ambivalent about it. It was supposed to be a challenge of spreading mental health awareness but instead became a trend on social media that just lost its meeting. At the same time, it did help raise a lot of awareness and money for the cause. A lot of it did just get lost in translation, so it’s really a mix.”—Shannon Mulyadi, junior