Mental Health Affects Teens

Acting out. Grades dropping. Difficulty sleeping. Isolation.

Mental health concerns affects, about 20 percent of teens in the U.S., according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and at FHN specifically, just last year about 12,000 students visited counselors for personal issues, the majority being for mental health.

Counselors can meet with students once or twice a week if that’s what the student feels he or she needs. Counselors talk to each student differently, because each student copes with mental health in a different way, though counselors do have a common method.

“We talk about what went well in your day and when was the last time you felt good, when was the last time you exercised, are you eating right, are you getting away from the negative effects of social media if that makes you feel low,” Head Counselor Lisa Woodrum said. “It’s really case-by-case, because maybe that person is depressed and has straight A’s or maybe that person is failing everything because of their depression. There are so many different ways to approach that conversation, and we try the best we can to find that.”

Sometimes, teachers may notice a change in the classroom without a student coming to them. For example, if grades drop, participation decreases or a student becomes more irritable, they may report it to the Student-Teacher Academic Intervention Team, a team made up of a counselor, an administrator, a special education teacher and a diagnostician used to determine what should be done to best help a student in need of intervention. The counselor then will schedule a time to meet with the student and a parent or guardian. If meeting once or twice a week isn’t enough, the student can meet with Emotional Support Counselor Barry Morrison, who can dedicate more time to the student.

“I meet with students individually,” Morrison said. “I do group work with students, and I handle crisis situations. I also work with students to create new techniques and strategies to handle situations. Some kids I meet with because of substance abuse, so I work with them to see what that’s about. It’s really looking at the underlying things that are going on and working with them on those to help them be successful as students.”

Though the counselors are available, promote a positive environment and spend a lot of time with students to make them comfortable, students may choose not to ask for help anyway, either because they find another way to cope or because they feel uncomfortable.

“I know it took me over a year to feel comfortable [talking about myself with my counselor],” junior Eve Abuazza said. “I think a lot of students feel that way, especially when talking about their personal issues. It would just make them uncomfortable to share all that.”

While counselors work directly to help students with face-to-face conversations, this year FHSD has implemented a new program in the elementary schools called Inspire that helps young students indirectly. The program focuses on the social-emotional needs for students, staff and family. Its goal is to advise teachers and counselors on how to help the students who are in their classrooms or the students they meet with. The Inspire program helps those in a student’s environment be there to support and adjust to a student’s needs to best help them with mental health.

“That comes through training students by giving them the tools to handle and react in a way that is healthy,” Adam Corbitt, special education teacher for the Inspire program, said. “I meet with teachers and look at students’ social history and possibly create a trauma plan and for the students in general we also have safety plans. Instead of a reaction team, we are a prevention team.”

A trauma plan and a safety plan for younger students are things like zones of regulation. The zones hold pictures of emotions that a child might be feeling, and it helps them identify the emotions that might be bothering them.

“It’s teaching them what the word is and what the feeling is about and then how to manage it,” Corbitt said. “It’s working through some of those feelings when you know what it is and so teaching kids that are younger, the goal is that they are aware of it, and they can keep working through it so when they get to be, if it’s still a condition they are working with, it becomes more manageable.”

Both Corbitt and Morrison think the Inspire program should be expanded to the high school level and hope it will in the future. Even without the program in higher levels of education, FHSD has still made mental health a bigger focus, especially with the hiring of a mental health director, Cherie Magueja, whose sole job is to focus on mental health in the district. Schools are working to help students the best they can to inform students and people in their surrounding environment.

“A lot of people believe that kids are doing these things on purpose or that kids are just mean or that kids are just participating in poor behavior just because,” Morrison said. “I think a lot of it is understanding that sometimes a reaction to something or the symptom of something of a diagnosis is really part of why they are doing what they are doing. If we can understand it, we can support it.”