Consider This from NPR - The Children's Mental Health Crisis Didn't Start With The Pandemic

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

The United States is experiencing an adolescent mental health crisis. Experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Surgeon General are stressing the urgent need to address the mental health needs of children and teens. The pandemic focused attention on this issue as young people dealt with isolation, the uncertainty of lockdown and grief over the death of loved ones. But while the pandemic exacerbated the problem, it has been building for years. We speak with Judith Warner, a journalist and author, to find out how we got to this point, and what can be done to help kids now. Warner's most recent piece, "We Have Essentially Turned a Blind Eye to Our Own Children for Decades," appears in The Washington Post Magazine.This episode deals with suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line by texting "HOME" to 741741. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. As someone who struggled with depression, suicidal ideation, eating disorder behavior, and anxiety throughout middle and early high school, I, for the longest time, believe that no one can relate to my experiences. That's Trace Terrell. He's 17. Speaking at a congressional hearing on children's mental health earlier this year, he talked about how his own struggles led him to volunteer at YouthLine, a crisis helpline where teens offer support to their peers. As I became more involved, I realized that my challenges were a microcosm of public health issues that affected hundreds of thousands of teens across the country.

Terrell read examples of texts he responds to as an intervention and outreach specialist. 4.07 p.m. I just need someone to talk to. 4.37 p.m. My dad hit me, but you can't call the cops. 5.23 p.m. I need therapy, but my family can't afford it. 6.42 p.m. I want to kill myself. We've seen elevated levels of stress, anxiety, different behavioral issues in students. Bob Mullaney is the superintendent of Millis Public Schools in Massachusetts. We've seen an increase in suicidal ideation, more suicide attempts, things that the school itself is really not equipped to handle. Heidi Baskfield is vice president of population health and advocacy

at Children's Hospital Colorado. Children experiencing the kind of distress that Bob Mulaney described often end up in her emergency room. On any given day in our emergency departments, there are between 15 and 40 children with mental health needs seeking care. Baskfield's hospital, like other mental health facilities across the country, is overwhelmed by the rising need for mental health services. We are consistently full with all of our mental health units. Our outpatient visits went from a three-week wait to sometimes upwards of nine months. And if you can imagine being a parent with a child who has mental health needs,

calling for support and basically being told, call us back in a year. And while it's tempting to point to the coronavirus pandemic as the cause of the problem, researchers and writers who've looked closely at the data are very clear. It exacerbated it, but it didn't cause it. Trouble signs have been showing up for years. According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control in 2019, well before the pandemic, one in six young people reported creating a suicide plan. That's a 44% increase since 2009. Certainly there's been an acceleration over the past 10 years. I think that there isn't any debate about that, especially when it comes to depression and anxiety. Consider this. Experts agree that the United States is experiencing a crisis in children's and teens' mental health.

There are a lot of reasons, but there are also a lot of ways that parents, caregivers and schools can help now. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, May 14th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm sure there was no point in time when kids didn't have mental health issues. I mean, that just wouldn't make sense because adults have them. Judith Warner is a journalist and author who's written extensively about mental health issues. Her recent piece in The Washington Post magazine is titled,

We Have Essentially Turned a Blind Eye to Our Own Children for Decades. And I asked her, how did we get here? You know, there are so many theories about it. And the most popular theory is always that it has to do with the advent of smartphones. And, you know, there's no doubt that life online has had an impact, social media has had some kind of impact, but none of the experts I've spoken with have ever been willing to just simplify it down to one thing. Another possibility is that earlier data wasn't as accurate

because parents and caregivers were less willing to discuss mental health. With each successive generation of parents, we have parents who are increasingly aware of mental health issues, grew up with people talking about them, bring less stigma to it than in generations before. I really see that with younger parents now compared to my own cohort, let's say. But this has also been a really stressful time in our country, you know, for quite a while now. And so I think that you can't separate out what's happening

with kids from what's been happening with all of us. But trying to get help for young people can mean getting caught up in a health care system that's up in the news. I mean, one practitioner that you talked to talked about a case from five years ago where a boy had a lapse in access to a medical professional. His medications lapsed, he got his hands on a gun and wound up shooting somebody. And so this had nothing to do with COVID. This had all had to do with sort of access to the kind of help that he needed. And I take it that you're saying this is a really big part of it, that there just isn't the infrastructure there to offer kids the kinds of support that they need right now. Absolutely. And that's what the problem is. This is a structural problem or a series of structural problems.

And they're not new. They're not going away. And, yes, that story really sums things up so powerfully. It's pre-COVID. It's going back five years. It's a boy who had been in care with a psychiatrist who retired, who didn't help the family find somebody else. The family couldn't find anyone, particularly anyone who took their insurance. They contacted the pediatrician practice, and the doctors there felt that it wasn't good practice, basically, for them to be refilling a complex cocktail of medications, as kids often receive, without having done the diagnosing themselves. So they started calling

around, and finally they found someone who had a wait time that wasn't too long. It was just about a month. But even so, his meds ran out. His condition got worse. He got his hands on a gun as way too many teenagers and younger kids do. Got into a fight and ended up shooting someone and ended up in jail for that. So the stakes are so high when you have the kind of lack of access that we have, both in terms of not having enough professionals who are available and also not having access to affordable mental health care. Coming up, what we can do to help kids in crisis. Experts from the CDC to the Surgeon General agree that mental health among children and teens is an emergency. But that's not news to desperate parents and caregivers looking for solutions.

There is a consensus among experts about what has to happen, and it turns around access and affordability and also diversifying the mental health workforce, the school counseling workforce. I mean, you see this over and over again. I also think there's a consensus in that expert community around the fact that something has to happen really fast and that you need to bring help to kids where they are. So you need to increase work that can be done in schools around giving them the tools basically to remain mentally healthier, you know, to deal with really high levels of distress, of anxiety or depression or, you know, to deal with really high levels of distress, of anxiety or depression, or, you know, often with teenagers, suicide attempts happen in a moment of just such high

emotional distress accompanied with the feeling of, I can't tolerate this anymore. So that's the expert consensus. And the problem is, I am not in any way convinced that any of that's going to happen. I mean, you know, one of the things that parents who are yelling at school board meetings are now yelling about is social emotional learning, which somehow has been turned into a vector for so-called critical race theory, none of which makes any sense. But if they're already pushing back on social emotional learning, then what's going to happen, you know, when you step it up a bit and say, well, you have to actually do some psychological skill building. So it's difficult to imagine. And also, there's a not great history. I mean, you know, it was reported recently that there was a new recommendation that kids should be screened for anxiety starting at age eight. That sounds fine and reasonable, except that some years ago, when there was a push to screen for depression in schools, there was a huge backlash to that with the idea that parents were being usurped by schools, by doctors, by whoever, again, who were looking to pathologize kids. So, you know, I hope, but I wonder if that'll really happen.

It sounds actually very discouraging. It sounds like a really discouraging picture. So can we leave people with some thoughts about what they can do if they are concerned about this, particularly for parents? Well, yeah, it's funny. I, this is because I'm such a negative person, but I don't think it's all that discouraging in that solutions do exist. solutions that work, that aren't terribly expensive, and that can be put into place really quickly and easily, meaning these school-based interventions, these trainings for people who are working in the schools to be able to recognize when something is going wrong with kids and then what to do about

it, but also what kinds of skills they can be imparting in the classroom or counseling offices to give kids better tools to be mentally hardier and mentally healthier. I mean, that's a really great thing and it could happen right away. And I think that for parents to be aware of that, it would be a very important and potentially powerful thing if they're demanding it, if they're demanding that there's funding for that, that time is being spent on that. Rather than, as is often the case, complaining that school time should just be used for academic subjects. Judith Warner is a journalist and best-selling author. Her latest book is And Then They Stopped Talking to Me, Making Sense of Middle School. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.