We are currently realizing how prevalent the issues like depression, anxiety and related mental health diagnoses are impacting our students in America. As these issues increase in frequency and in manifestations of behavior that is not manageable in schools, there are great concerns about the future of education.
Our students report high degrees of stress, anxiety and depression. Data from the CDC shows that 40% of students had persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023, with nearly 1 in 10 seriously considering suicide. The rise in mental health issues among young people has been ongoing since at least 2012, with the COVID-19 pandemic acting as a significant accelerant.
Some of the causes of these mental health symptoms include:
Societal Pressures: Young people face a different world than previous generations, leading to increased adverse effects on their well-being.
Economic Concerns: Anxiety about finances and job prospects contributes to stress and poor mental health.
Access to Care: While demand for school-based mental health services has risen, many schools struggle to provide adequate support to all students in need.
Exposure to Trauma: Exposure to poverty, abuse, and violence can make adolescents more vulnerable to mental health problems.
Schools are simply not equipped to provide the level of mental health services that our current students require. Thus, the emotions, behaviors and struggles of students have created confusion, chaos, and classrooms that are out-of-control for teachers. The administrators have become crisis managers and the educational quality has become severely compromised.
This post-pandemic increase in mental health issues has contributed to school environments where teachers are also full of anxiety with their own stress and trauma as they try to teach. For many the task seems impossible, and the consequence of this is that there is a teacher shortage in schools. Managing mental health is just not what teachers signed up for nor are they trained to deal with the severity of the students’ needs.
Unless we find ways to offer mental health services to students and to teachers, this problem will grow exponentially. The additional funding freezes and cuts to schools has exasperated the situation even further. It is incumbent on our country to change this serious trajectory, or we will see test scores drop, drop-out rates increase, and a decrease in successful graduations which could impact an entire generation of students.
In our training for schools through our NeuroLogic by Lakeside program, we have helped thousands of teachers and school administrators learn how to regulate themselves and their students. However, the funding for training for school staff through grants has either been discontinued or frozen in national and state-wide budgets. So, even the training for school staff has been compromised by our current systems. The picture looks bleak for us to resolve this crisis. We need to make serious changes if we are going to help our students with their growing mental health struggles. It is essential that we provide support to students, their teachers and their schools or these consequences will only grow in severity of impact.
Gerry Vassar
President/CEO
