By Lila Thulin, Smithsonian Magazine, August 26, 2021
At one point last year, high schooler Rasha Alqahtani had finals coming up and 35 Zoom calls booked. To manage her busy schedule, she had duplicate calendars—one on Google Calendar, the other printed and placed behind her laptop, so that even a power outage wouldn’t derail her. The now-18-year-old from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had laser-like focus on an extracurricular passion project: Creating a video-game tool to help diagnose teenagers with generalized anxiety disorder.
Alqahtani’s ambitious proposal—inspired, in part, by personal experience with the stressors of the pandemic—won her a behavioral science award in this year’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, an annual competition for ninth through twelfth graders administered by the Society for Science in Washington, D.C. Her prototype aims to address the problems of stigma and inaccessibility that, psychologists say, present substantial roadblocks to teens getting mental health care.
Alqahtani began researching her prizewinning project last year as a participant in Mawhiba, a national STEM program for gifted-and-talented students in Saudi Arabia. Over Zoom, gesturing with hands laden with silver rings, Alqahtani recounts how she wanted to work toward something that would genuinely help people in her generation. (The desire to help is such a guiding principle that she repeats the word 41 more times during our conversation.) She’d seen anxiety affect the lives of people around her—a family member, a “genius” schoolmate who’d cry and hyperventilate with each test, strangers in TikTok confessionals. To some extent, she struggled with it herself, as “a straight-A student trying to keep perfection.”
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