As teen mental health worsens, schools learn how to help

Teen mental health already was deteriorating before the coronavirus pandemic. In the two years since, the isolation, grief and anxiety created by school closures, deaths and loss of family income have led to even steeper declines in children’s mental health, experts say.

Awash in federal pandemic relief money — roughly $190 billion in education and health grants over the next four years — states are responding.

Last year, 38 states enacted nearly 100 laws providing additional resources to support mental well-being in K-12 schools, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy, a Portland, Maine-based policy research group. Dozens of additional school mental health bills became law this year in at least 22 states, according to the group.

“That’s a huge increase in legislative activity over anything we’ve seen in recent years,” said Tramaine EL-Amin, client experience officer at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, a nonprofit that represents mental health providers.

“The pandemic shined a spotlight on our children’s mental health,” she said. “There’s no question that it’s something we need to pay attention to and that we need to act pretty quickly so that things don’t get worse.”

Broadly, the new state laws aim to upgrade school mental health resources and create comprehensive plans to prevent teen suicides and promote child mental well-being.

A central theme in many of the pandemic-inspired new laws is mental health training.

At least 16 states, from Alaska to Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia, now require K-12 teachers and other school staff to take training courses on how to recognize mental distress in students and what to do when they see it.

California, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington enacted new laws recommending high school students take mental health training courses so they can help their friends, family and classmates.

“Teachers are critical to identifying students who need mental health supports,” said Nancy Lever, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“But we also need to make sure that parents and other school staff who interact with students are trained to recognize mental health crises and understand how trauma affects children’s mental health and learning,” she said.

In addition to laws aimed at training teachers, bus drivers, and security and lunchroom staff, states also are providing money to help schools meet recommended ratios of students to mental health professionals, including counselors, psychologists and social workers.

In some states, new laws provide money for mental health screening and data collection tools that schools can use to develop longrange mental health strategies and measure their progress. Other laws require school boards to develop evidence-based plans for protecting the mental health of K-12 students.

“This is not new territory,” Lever said, “but it’s important territory that schools need to plan for so they can promote the mental well-being of all students and staff, and at the same time, identify and care for those in crisis.”

A key to schools’ success will be building in sustainability so the programs can go on when the funding ends, she added.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already growing crisis in adolescent mental health. Last year, a group of pediatricians, child psychiatrists and children’s hospitals declared a state of emergency for children’s mental health.

In 2019, a national survey conducted by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration showed that the percentage of young people ages 12 to 17 who reported experiencing a major depressive episode in the past year had nearly doubled over the past decade, increasing from 9% or 2.2 million children in 2004 to 16% or 3.8 million children in 2019.

By 2021, more than a quarter of U.S. parents reported their adolescent had seen a mental health specialist, with 59% doing so in the past year, according to a survey published last month by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan.