The COVID-19 pandemic has had many effects, one of which has been a severe negative impact on kids’ mental health. There’s been renewed concern about mental health in the wake of recent mass shootings, but the crisis has also led to higher rates of depression, lower school performance, and most troubling, an increase in suicide attempts and other acts of self-harm.
What do we know about the situation today, and what can we do to make it better?
97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck spoke this week with Mitch Prinstein, a professor in UNC’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience who’s also currently serving as chief science officer for the American Psychological Association. Prinstein recently co-wrote an article in Scientific American, addressing the “mental health crisis” affecting young people and what can be done about it.
Listen to their conversation.
Aaron Keck: I read the Scientific American article: it was really striking, and the most striking thing about it was literally the first sentence: “Young people in the United States are experiencing a mental health crisis.” What do we know about it?
Mitch Prinstein: It’s a crisis that started long before the pandemic. The fact is, we’ve been neglecting mental health for decades and children are paying the price for it now.
Read the article, “Science Shows How to Protect Kids’ Mental Health, But It’s Being Ignored.”
Keck: Is it getting worse?
Prinstein: Yes. During the pandemic, we definitely saw that numbers were getting worse. A remarkable number of kids are experiencing depression (and) loneliness, and rates of admission to the ED for suicide has increased. And not all kids are experiencing it the same way. We’re definitely seeing disparities, with kids from minoritized populations (LGBTQ and racial/ethnic minorities) especially bearing the brunt of the mental health crisis.
Keck: You mentioned some impacts there — what are some of the other effects that we see?
Prinstein: We’re seeing that both kids and adults are really having a tough time. Some kids are experiencing more exposure to violence or conflict at home. Kids are experiencing more bullying and victimization and loneliness at school. (And) as so many people saw during the school year, it’s just hard to concentrate. Kids are having a hard time feeling hopeful. And they’re experiencing this in the context of all of these global crises and challenges. So it’s really hard to get kids to be motivated and to be able to fulfill their normal school and social responsibilities in a day.
Keck: One of my favorite local nonprofits is the SKJAJA Fund. They usually work to provide funding for kids to do extracurricular activities. But I was struck recently by a conversation I had with Karen (Kalafatas), who runs that organization: she said, “you know, I’ve been talking with principals and teachers about what we can do. And all of them are universally saying the same thing, which is ‘what can you do to bring joy back into the classroom?'” That was such a specific phrase that she used. She said so many administrators are using that exact same phrase, just a lack of joy in the school building or in the classroom in a way that we’ve never seen before. And they’re reaching out to anyone and everyone to try to address it. And this is exactly what you’re speaking to as well.
Prinstein: It’s such a great point. And it’s really true. I mean, in the school districts that we work with outside of the Triangle, we’re being told that kids are literally lined up down the hallway, just waiting to talk with a counselor or social worker. I mean, usually these are folks that are already overburdened because there’s so many folks that need to speak with them, but never before have we seen people lined up, you know, just waiting for ten minutes to talk with somebody.
Keck: So what do we know about policies and practices and programs that can make a difference in addressing this? Where do we start?
Prinstein: There’s so much that needs to be done. I’ll give you three things.
One, our country spends $6 billion a year to make sure that we have enough physicians to attend to our physical health needs. We spend 1/750th of that amount for mental health. It’s just remarkable how much we are not investing in ensuring that we have enough mental health providers and making sure that they’re equally distributed across rural, suburban and urban areas.
The second thing is that when people finally do get into see a mental health professional, because their child is in crisis, there are so many different treatment options available — but only some are backed by science that we know is likely to work. It’s so important that parents are educated to know how they can find the treatment that’s most likely to help their kids.
And then third: we have so much science that can help us prevent mental health difficulties before they even get started, to really help inoculate kids against stressors. But these are not brought to scale. They are not generally funded. And that’s just a real shame. Imagine the same for physical health. We would never just let a vaccine sit on a shelf. We would invest in prevention. We would help people understand the behaviors they need to engage in so they can avoid experiencing a crisis.
Keck: So what does prevent people from suffering mental health issues?
Prinstein: We can teach kids emotion regulation skills, skills in social competence, adaptive socially supportive relationships, (and) mindfulness skills, so kids can learn how to cope with stress. Scientific literacy skills as well. And cognitive reappraisal, which is basically a way of saying that we interpret stressors as due to what actually made them occur, rather than internally, kind of blaming ourselves. If we taught kids those five different skills, we could probably avoid a huge proportion of the mental health problems that we see throughout middle and high school.
Keck: The other thing that you speak to in the Scientific American article — and this is something I’ve been hearing over and over again in the context of mass shootings — is social isolation, the extent to which kids are increasingly isolated. Certainly the pandemic exacerbated that. What can we do to address that?
Prinstein: You know, it’s kind of funny that we have to say this, but kids have fallen out of practice with their day-to-day in-person interactions. Not just because of the pandemic, but also because of the reliance on more electronically mediated ways of interacting. So we’ve got kids that are feeling really socially anxious when they’re in the presence of other kids in real life. And they have a hard time engaging in conversation, controlling themselves when they experience normal kinds of peer conflict. And then there are a lot of kids who are feeling like they don’t have a community, people who have the same identities as they do when they’re in a school context. And as we’re seeing states making it harder and harder for kids to express and discuss that identity, it really exacerbates the problem — because research clearly shows that a sense of community and belongingness is so important to promote adaptive mental health.
Keck: So turning our attention to what can we do: if I’m a parent and I’ve got kids, or if I’m a teacher and I’ve got a classroom, and I want to make sure that they have the resources that they need or the skills they can use — what’s my first step?
Prinstein: I think the first step is that we’ve got to talk about mental health more openly. And I think we’re doing that. Especially this generation is open to doing that. So it’s on adults to meet kids where they are, which means to be open and to model and express how we’re all coping right now. What are some of the things that are normal reactions to a very abnormal situation, and what are the ways that we cope with feeling stress and distress? I think that really normalizes things for kids, and helps them understand they’re not the only one that feels that way.
The other thing we need to do: people who are experiencing a crisis, who are having a hard time getting through the day, finishing up their work or having adaptive social interactions, they need treatment from a trained mental health provider. There’s actually a nonprofit out there. It’s called the Society of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology. They have a website, EffectiveChildTherapy.org, a free website to teach parents about which approaches to treatment have the most scientific support.
Keck: What can lawmakers do?
Prinstein: Fund more mental health providers. I’d love to see this at the federal level, but we could be doing it here in North Carolina as well. Let’s fund more in-school, schoolwide, grade-wide, even classroom-wide prevention programs. We know how to do it, let’s do it.
And let’s do screening for mental health difficulties. I’ve done that here in North Carolina for years. We can go into a school district and screen for suicidality, and invariably we catch dozens of kids who acutely thinking of entering themselves or ending their lives. And no one knows about it. We could be doing this at a statewide level, and really helping and saving a lot of kids before they engage in pretty dangerous behaviors.
Keck: If people want to know more about those prevention skills that you mentioned, those emotional coping skills, where can they go for that?
Prinstein: There’s so much great information that’s out there. The American Psychological Association (and) the Society for Prevention Research are have a tremendous amount of really excellent resources. I’d also recommend the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: AFSP has great resources that school administrators could use to think about how to talk about suicide and screen for suicide in their own schools.
Visit the website for the AFSP’s North Carolina chapter.
I think it’s so great that we’re talking about this, because it’s something that still exists in the shadows. We don’t talk openly about mental health, even though about 80 percent of people will experience a diagnosable mental health disorder at some point in their lifetime. We don’t talk about it as openly. And we really should. I think that conversations like this, and conversations people can have with their own social networks, can really help people feel that they’re not alone in the struggles that they’re dealing with for their kids — and that kids aren’t alone in how hard these past few years have been for them.
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our biweekly newsletter.
