Op-Ed: Carrying Depression’s Weight in Your Backpack
By: Caitlin Kelly
Tags: Schools, Depression, Mental Health Awareness, Mental Health

Written By Caitlin Kelly

It’s alarming to hear anyone kill themselves, but imagine seeing on the news that a 14-year old boy hung himself in his childhood home. That was the reality of Jason Reid when he lost his son to depression. An estimated 10–20% of adolescents globally experience mental health conditions, yet these remain underdiagnosed and undertreated. Approximately 17 million children in the United States have or have had a mental illness that was untreated. What is society doing to negatively affect a teenager's mental health, and why aren’t we treating it?

Around 16.5% of youth aged 6–17 have a mental health disorder in 2016. For most of their youth, adolescents are attending school. Therefore, are schools and education somehow affecting a child’s mental health? Mental health can be affected by the stress surrounding education or the super high expectations in SAT scores and GPA ratings. According to the APA’s Stress in America Survey more than one-third of teens reported feeling tired (36 percent) and nearly one-quarter of teens (23 percent) reported skipping a meal due to stress. Stress at a young age can lead to more serious effects as in mental health, this has led to redundancy, inappropriate competition, and inadequate results. Along with stress causing mental health declines, there is also an increase in bullying. Scientists found strong evidence that being bullied as a child puts kids at high risk for depression as a young adult, according to the study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Being bullied at school can put many teenagers at risk of negative self-image and lead them to depression. Some other children may develop aggressive tendencies. Children may face problems at home that can cause them to be pushed over the edge into mental health issues.

So if mental health declines can be caused by stress and bullying in schools and other possible outside factors, what can happen when mental health is negatively affected, and what is being done to treat it? When mental health is affected in students it can affect their ability to learn and even if some resources are available, many don’t use them. Approximately 26 percent of adults and 20 percent of children experience diagnosable mental health conditions each year (NIMH, 2019). However, few individuals utilize the needed services when it comes to seeking treatment from professionals such as a psychologist or therapist. Individuals are scared around the sigma of having a mental health disorder along with understanding mental health disorders that affect everyone differently. Many students need individual attention to these unmet needs in order to be able to have undisrupted learning.

Examples of common mental health disorders seen in teenagers are anxiety disorders, depression, ADHD, eating disorders and others. “Addressing psychosocial and mental health concerns in schools is typically not assigned a high priority, except when a high-visibility event occurs, such as shooting on campus, a student suicide, or an increase in bullying (NASSP).” Especially in schools, there is rarely enough funding for each school to enforce a mental health counselor and treat the students, since they’re not sure they will be utilized even if they did. Many resource-starved districts have cut — or never had on staff — critical positions, namely school psychologists, undermining their schools’ ability and capacity to properly address these challenges. According to a 2017 Oregon Healthy Teens Survey, 18% of high school juniors and 17% of 8th graders reported that they had “seriously considered” suicide in the previous 12 months. The percentages were even higher for LGBTQ youth.

Even with schools enforcing some mental health aid and efforts toward teaching and advancing education around mental health, why is there still a stigma surrounding it? Mental health is the main issue in education because “for unfortunate historical and cultural reasons, mental illness has persistently been stigmatized in our society. This stigma is manifested by bias, distrust, stereotyping, fear, embarrassment, anger, and/or avoidance. Acknowledging that students may be experiencing a mental health issue and allowing them to be excused to tend to their mental health encourages conversations with parents. It also allows for excused absences for appointments to get the help they may need. These absences may help the big crisis of disrupted learning in classrooms. Many parents of teenagers aren’t ready to face the reality of if their child is facing a mental illness because of the stigma surrounding it. This causes mental illness to be viewed as shameful in one’s eyes.

Recently, schools have been very concerned about encouraging mental health treatment, but how are they handling this? There is a bill called NAMI. NAMI supports the Mental Health in Schools Act. This bill provides federal funding to train school staff on mental health-related issues, to establish comprehensive school-based mental health services and to create links between schools and the community mental health system. Additionally, many middle schools and high schools have been holding assemblies in varied subjects from anti-bullying, how to deal with stress and sometimes mental health itself. Some educators are also getting additional training on how to emotionally support students and study the signs of if a student needs additional help. In the future, many mental health advocates hope to see that taking a sick day for mental health is appropriate.

In conclusion, the mental health crisis has many different layers and problems intertwined into it, making it difficult to fix. If we start at the youth and determine the initial childhood problems then we may be able to slowly change the stigmas surrounding mental health and providing aid to individuals who need it. Signs of troubled kids may be easier to spot for educators before it is too late and mental health issues turn into something bigger. Now take time to think to yourself. How are you able to change and frame the mental health issues so that there isn’t a negative stigma? How can schools accurately address mental health in youth? What can be done in order to help mental health in adolescents?

Caitlin Kelly is an award-winning filmmaker for a film she created in 2016 titled “Depression.” She has always advocated for mental health support, whether in education or just generally. She spreads her activism through her films and documentaries. She is a current San Francisco State University student studying cinema. She was born in Amsterdam and raised in Los Angeles.

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