Local School Districts Focus on Helping Students on World Mental Health Day

Monday, October 10 is World Mental Health Day.

It’s an initiative by the World Health Organization to help raise awareness and increase resources for mental illness, especially since the pandemic.

Mental health issues had been trending upward even before COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1 in 3 high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness in 2019. That was a 40% increase since 2009.

That data has increased even more in the past year. The CDC also says in 2021, more than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic. 44% reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless.

Locally, there’s a big focus on how to help youth struggling with mental health.

School districts like Dallas ISD are working to encourage everyone to talk about these things and break the stigma. One big part of that is social emotional learning, or SEL.

SEL teaches students self-management and self-awareness every day. It’s so important, that DISD created a department for it. Click here for more information.

They offer resources to families, training to teachers and staff, and tools like smartphone apps that alert counselors to students who are showing signs of feeling down or anxious.

Counseling services has even incorporated suicide prevention education into its guidance lessons with specific training for all staff.

Stephanie Chung with Teach For America DFW also works with their Dallas ISD and Fort Worth ISD teachers on social emotional learning as well.

“Students especially are navigating lots of pressures, different, different challenges in their lives and in school,” she said. “For teachers, for them to incorporate social emotional learning skills in everyday classroom routines and everyday lessons, it really helps students to start building those skills that they need to navigate all of the challenges that they’re working with.”

She said it’s important for parents and teachers to really re-frame the way they look at mental health in youth right now.

“If a student is feeling sick and is having a fever in school, they’re probably not able to concentrate or learn in the classroom. And so I think we need to start thinking about students’ mental health in that same way,” Chung said. “If a student is experiencing overwhelming anxiety or depression, they’re probably also not able to learn to the fullest potential in class. And so be mindful of that, as both a teacher and a parent.”

Parents and teachers are up against a lot. Teens are dealing with all kinds of new pressures – including social media. The signs can also be different in every person.

“I think that the signs that you can see in students – they show up in lots of different ways. They can show up in how a student interacts with their classmates and how students are able to concentrate and focus on classwork. It can also show up in their just overall health. If they’re having a headache or if they’re having a stomachache, those are all signs that can point to things happening with a student’s mental health.”

Finally, Chung pointed out that although society has a lot to work on in providing more mental health support for all – including people of color and the LGBTQ community – there has been a lot of progress made in the last three decades.

‘We’ve definitely come a long way. And it’s great now to even sometimes hear students talk about their own wellness and their own mental well-being – for them to have the vocabulary, for them to have the words,” she said. “That’s something that decades ago, not everyone had. We didn’t always know the words, to express what we were feeling.”

Dallas ISD has also been making efforts to hire 30 to 40 more licensed mental health clinicians for this school year. In previous years, clinicians were juggling three or four schools at once but now more schools will get focused attention and more students will have access to someone to talk to.

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