LEWISTON – Gripping a worn notebook, her wide eyes serious behind glasses, 19-year-old Tiffani Sebastian fought to be heard over the whir of Cafe Bon-Bon’s espresso machine and the buzz of a faulty mic.

“I’m sick of labels.”

“Sorry, the universe said to me.”

“Someone help me get a grip.”

Written six months ago during a jag of sleepless nights caused by a new medication, Sebastian’s eight-page, rambling piece – “Cigarettes & Peppermint” – gave a teenager’s point of view of mental hospitals and doctors, drugs and abuse. Her voice didn’t waiver.

“Why didn’t anyone notice my real problem sooner?”

“What a crazy world we live in.”

“How much do you really love me?”

For 10 minutes, Sebastian read, ignoring the cafe’s cacophony around her, ignoring the room packed with teenagers, city officials and others who had come to hear her words. Then she paused, her gaze flicking to the audience.

“No more pills. No more therapy,” she said with a light triumph that signaled the poem’s end. “I’m going to do this on my own.”

The applause drowned out even the coffee machine.

Sebastian and more than a dozen other teens and 20-somethings from THRIVE, a group that helps children, young adults and their families with mental health issues, participated in an open mic night at Cafe Bon-Bon Friday. The goal: kick off Children’s Mental Health Week , May 4-9, and make the community more aware of the mental health challenges facing young people.

The event was put together by 15 young THRIVE members, all between 16 and 22 years old.

“I did this because I can make a difference,” Sebastian said. “It’s satisfying.”

Clutching journals and sheets of notebook paper, some of the young adults read poems and stories about being beaten by their mother’s boyfriend or molested by a family member or attempting suicide. Others recited statistics about young people and mental health issues. One man, 22-year-old Mike Prior of Lewiston, used the time to simply talk about his life.

“I just let it flow,” he said.

After being pulled from his home at 15 for “inappropriate sexual behavior,” he said, he spent years bouncing from program to program, from a group home to independent living facility to a shelter. One program dumped him on the streets of Lewiston with no job and no place to stay, he said.

After getting help through THRIVE, he has an apartment, friends and “the cutest cat in the world.”

“My life, I’m not going to say it couldn’t be better,” he said. “But it could be worse.”

Sebastian, too, felt like her life had gotten better since THRIVE. As a child, she said, she was repeatedly hospitalized, medicated and diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to attention deficit disorder. She’s now off her medications and planning this month to start training to become a certified nursing assistant, then a nurse.

She opened the event with “Cigarettes & Peppermint.” She ended it with “Closed But Not the End.”

“Whew, made it,” she read. “I’m OK.”