Documentary examines mental health in young
Barrett Kuntz was just 14 years old when anxiety and depression began to take hold of his life.
Withdrawing from the world around him, he felt as if he had no one to reach out to for help.
It wasn’t until age 20 that Kuntz finally saw a doctor and started accumulating a tool kit of coping mechanisms.
Now he’s telling his story as part of the third instalment in a documentary series produced by the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN), which focuses on what SUN describes as a growing crisis of youth mental health issues in the province.
“I found myself withdrawing from friends and family. I was isolating myself,” said Kuntz.
“It was lonely and it compounded the problem.”
“I wanted to share with kids and youth that it’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to be vulnerable,” he said.
The documentary includes testimony and insight from registered psychiatric nurses, psychologists, peer support workers like Kuntz, and a Grade 7/8 class at St. Gregory School that is working to combat mental health stigma.
With suicide the second-leading cause of death among Canadian youth, the documentary advocates for more mental health and early intervention resources to be dedicated to youth in Saskatchewan.
It also highlights the unique challenges facing today’s youth — including technology, social media and pressures to succeed.
“Our youth is our future, and we need to really start paying attention to how much pressure these kids are under,” said SUN president Tracy Zambory.
“For the government, I hope that they can see that it’s time for early intervention. We really need to step up as a society and as a health-care system.”
She wants people, especially youth, to understand that it’s OK not to be OK, a message educator Brett Matlock and his class are working to spread. For the past six years, Matlock and his class have participated in the Understandus campaign, meant to provide awareness and education to overcome mental health barriers.
“I see a lot of those signs and symptoms, whether they’re emotional, psychosomatic, physiological ... within children and they don’t really know how to deal with it,” said Matlock.
“It’s a hard thing to address ... because they don’t really know what’s going on, so when you see that, I think it’s important to create that conversation around it.”
Featured in the documentary is Alex Jones, who has taken on the role of a student mental health leader at St. Gregory.
Having youth lead the charge to reducing mental health stigma is important, says Matlock, and is an idea also highlighted by the documentary.
“Being the same peer group, it’s easier for them to relate. An adult telling them to do this or an adult giving advice might not come across the same,” said Kuntz, who is now 31 years old and attends but also is a peer support group leader at a weekly mood disorder support group.
For Matlock, he’s seen the difference that simply talking about mental health at school and with your peers can make.
Since starting the campaign six years ago, he’s had students and their families come forward and ask for help.
“Oftentimes it takes that one person to be fearless in the fight for something in order for us to open up about it,” he said.
Zambory applauded the work being done, but highlighted the need for more in order to address what SUN describes as a growing crisis.
“In our documentary there are some schools that are doing great things,” said Zambory.
“This should be commonplace in every single school. We should be thinking about putting the nurses back in school so that these kids have someone who has the education and the experience.”
The documentary is set to première 3 p.m. Wednesday at the Queensbury Convention Centre to an audience of more than 300 business, health and community leaders, including the minister of advanced education and the minister of health.
A link to the documentary will be posted on the SUN website after the première.