How To Help A Teen Struggling With Their Mental Health
Providing therapy in schools, supporting boys through video games, cultivating teens' sense of purpose, and other big ideas worth exploring
Hi readers -
I hope you are doing well! and I are working away on our upcoming book, TALK TO YOUR BOYS. Right now I’m researching a chapter about education, and thinking a lot about what is and isn’t working for boys in our schools.
Have the boys in your life struggled with school? Are there things you wish were different? I’d love to hear from you with questions, ideas, or suggestions. Please get in touch!
Today’s newsletter is all about mental health, one of the most pressing issues for our young people. I hope you find some resources here that are interesting, helpful, and worth sharing. We’re all in this together.
— Christopher
Providing Mental Health Services AT School Works
Anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are a huge challenge for our young people right now, and suicide continues to be one of the leading causes of death for teens. Approximately one in five U.S. adolescents in 2021 had a major depressive episode, and fewer than half of teens who needed help were able to access treatment services.
One solution some schools are trying is providing mental health care right on campus. In this model, licensed mental health clinicians who work for mental health agencies are placed directly in schools, complementing the existing capacity of school counselors and social workers.
A new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health addresses this gap. Researchers studied data from 263 K-12 schools in Minnesota's Hennepin County, many of which implemented school-based mental health services between 2001 and 2019. The study found:
The school-based mental health program increased students' access to mental health services by 8%.
Rates of attempted suicide decreased by 15%, averting approximately 260 self-reported suicide attempts per year.
I’ve taught in several schools with Wellness programs that offer mental health services, and I’ve become a big proponent of this model of care. Just like I want every school in the country to have great health classes, I want every school to have a clinic or Wellness Center where students can get help when they need it.
An Innovative New Effort To Support Young Men
Team: Changing Minds is a national network of mental health responders dedicated to helping young people, and especially young men, connect to support. Here’s how they explain the need:
”It’s called the 10-year gap. While half of mental health challenges show up by age 14, it takes another 10+ years for most people to access help. For male-identified youth, it often takes even longer… if help comes at all.
Of all demographic groups, young men are the least likely to get mental health support. For young Black and Brown men, deeply entrenched racism further blocks their access to help. The consequences can be devastating. Men are 3.6 times more likely to die by suicide, and there has been a sharp rise in suicides among male-identified teens in recent decades. Yet, there is hope. Research shows that when young people are offered mental health support by someone they know and trust, they are much more likely to seek help sooner, saving lives and protecting futures.
A partnership between Futures Without Violence, National Council for Mental Wellbeing, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Team: Changing Minds is working to activate the trusted peers and adults in young people’s lives, who are already engaged in pastimes they love (like video games, mentoring, and sports) – ensuring help is just a click, call, or connection away. They are actively looking for more people to become responders.
What’s Causing The Teen Mental Health Crisis? A Theory
Edutopia just released a roundup of “The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2023,” and one examines the roots of the current mental health crisis. Here’s what authors Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill write:
Parents, teachers, and medical professionals are wringing their hands over the alarming, decades-long rise in teenage mental health issues, including depression, feelings of “persistent hopelessness,” and drug addiction.
The root causes remain elusive—cell phones and social media are prime suspects—but a sprawling 2023 study offers another explanation that’s gaining traction: After scouring surveys, data sets, and cultural artifacts, researchers theorized that a primary cause is “a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
Scholarly reviews of historical articles, books, and advice columns on child rearing depict an era when young children “walked or biked to school alone,” and contributed to their “family’s well being” and “community life” through meaningful chores and jobs. If that all feels vaguely mythical, data collected over the last 50 years reveals a correlation: frank admissions by parents that their children play outdoors independently less than they did, and significant drops in the number of kids who walk, bike, or bus to school alone or are allowed to cross busy roads by themselves. In the U.S., for example, a government survey showed that 48 percent of K–8 students walked to school in 1969, but by 2009 only 13 percent did.
Risky play and unsupervised outdoor activities, meanwhile, which might “protect against the development of phobias” and reduce “future anxiety by increasing the person’s confidence that they can deal effectively with emergencies,” are often frowned upon. That last point is crucial, because dozens of studies suggest that happiness in childhood, and then later in adolescence, is driven by internal feelings of “autonomy, competence, and relatedness”—and independent play, purposeful work, and important roles in classrooms and families are vital, early forms of practice.
What do you think of this theory? Let us know in the comments.
How Can We Help Teens Find A Sense Of Purpose?
Helping youth develop a sense of purpose can build resilience, support mental health, reduce dangerous risk taking, and provide a sense of direction and motivation. Unfortunately, not all youth have equal access to the kinds of opportunities that could support them as they develop their sense of purpose.
In this online panel discussion, the authors of the new report, “Cultivating Purpose in Adolescence,” from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence at UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent discuss how programs and policies could help support all young people to discover their direction and how they want to contribute to the world.
Lisa Damour’s Best Tips For Connecting With Teens
Lisa Damour, author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, says that “The strongest forces for adolescent mental health are caring relationships with loving adults. Teenagers need adults who get them and back them and are connected to them.”
In this Aspen Ideas interview, she shares her answers to two big questions about connecting with teens:
How do we cultivate relationships with the teens in our lives?
If you had to give adults a cheat sheet for having conversations with teens, what would be on there?
Bringing More Connection And Wellbeing Into Schools
Through her new website, The SEL Educator, Rae Merrigan is a sharing resources to help people focus on Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), Health and Well-Being in schools.
Merrigan, who is the Health teacher at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia, writes that she believes in the transformative power of education to create a more compassionate and equitable world. Through SEL, Rae aims to empower students to enter the world equipped with empathy, strong interpersonal relationship skills, and the capacity to make responsible and ethical decisions.
The Best Resources For Addressing Teen Depression
It can be challenging for parents and educators to find quality materials to support conversations about depression and suicide prevention. That’s why I’m glad to know about Shine A Light on Depression. This website brings together diverse organizations to amplify the conversation around childhood and teen depression and suicide. Collaborating organizations: American School Health Association, Elevance Health, Erika’s Lighthouse, Masco Corporation, and the National PTA.
Building Hope: 9 Essential Steps to Reducing Youth Suicide
The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on protecting emotional health and preventing suicide among our nation’s teens and young adults, recently issued “Youth Suicide: Current Trends and the Path to Prevention,” which highlights suicide trends among youth and helps clarify the most effective prevention tools.
Supporting youth mental health and preventing suicide requires a systemwide, evidence-based approach. As part of the report, JED outlined nine essential steps to reducing youth suicide that offer solutions to support all youth — including specific recommendations for groups of young people who face additional stressors — improve youth mental health, and prevent suicide.
The CDC’s Best Mental Health Strategies
Schools are prioritizing students’ mental health, and there are many tools and resources to choose from. CDC created this action guide as a place to start. It can help school and district leaders build on what they are already doing to promote students’ mental health and find new strategies to fill in gaps.
The action guide describes six in-school strategies that are proven to promote and support mental health and well-being. For each strategy, the guide also describes approaches, or specific ways to put the strategy into action, and examples of evidence-based policies, programs, and practices.
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I'm so glad the Gray, Lancy, Bjorkland article is highlighted here. While there is likely no singular cause of the teen mental health crisis, I wish we (collectively) would take much more seriously the impact of reduced opportunities for free play, independent exploration, and the autonomy of young people in schools, at home, and in the community. There is so much energy poured into trying to improve the mental health of young people as if the problem is the individual, and if our intervention can fix the child then the problem is fixed, and not enough energy directed toward the possibility that the root problem is that young people don't feel they have any control over their lives. And when we feel we don't have any control then that opens the door to suffering. And until the lack of control is addressed there will continue to be more and more kids who suffer.
So much goodness here. 🙏🏼 You inspire me to re-engage with youngers, potentially as a Responder. As a former Teen Talking Circle facilitator and Youth Suicide Prevention curriculum developer, Lisa Damour's bit about Agenda-Free adults in a teen's life is so powerful.