Policy may be changed by health survey
Amid growing recognition of a state and national crisis, the 2023 Saspeakup Teen Mental Health Survey will give San Antonio’s youth a chance to steer the spending of millions of dollars toward resources to help.
Available to respondents ages 12 to 19 in English and Spanish, the confidential online questionnaire will run through April 9.
It was created “by young people for young people” to generate policy recommendations, according to its website, as a project of the San Antonio Youth Commission, a group of high school students from around the city, and the Project Worth Teen Ambassadors, local middle and high school students who volunteer to support teen health.
When it was first conducted last year, slightly more than a third of the respondents reported having thoughts of suicidal ideation, said Jemm Morris, the youth commission liaison with San Antonio’s Department of Human Services.
Morris is using the results to help inform programs under the SA Forward plan to improve community health in a partnership with the Metropolitan Health District. But last year’s roughly 1,000 responses weren’t enough to do really deep analyses on what the data showed in individual city council districts, he said.
Organizers hope to double the survey response this year and are trying to reach more middle school students in particular, said Ellen Spitsen, manager of the Project Worth program at Metro Health. They are marketing the survey in movie theaters and on Instagram and urging school districts to let young people know about it.
A bigger response could identify changes or trends compared with last year and help guide the spending of $15 million available in American Rescue Plan funding allocated by Congress in 2021 for pandemic recovery stimulus, Morris said.
“The impact that youth have on helping direct funds, and helping advocate for them
selves and saying, ‘Hey, we need some help,’ really starts with the survey, so that we can understand the data, what’s going on and what is needed by collecting their voice,” Spitsen said.
The survey is opt-in, available at Saspeakup.com/ Teenhealth. Without a random sample of the teen population, the results can’t be generalized to all local teens.
But a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its 2021 survey on youth risk and behavior nationwide showed unprecedented reports of violence and trauma amid the coronavirus pandemic, particularly from girls, 57 percent of whom said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.”
“We’re seeing increased numbers of suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, and just overall lethargy around so much of what’s going on in their lives, but they’re still expected to go to school,” Morris said of teenagers. “And on top of that, now they have to factor in personal safety.
“They have active shooter trainings, but then they’re supposed to go back to school as if nothing happened the next day. All of those stressors are a part of their lived experience, every week, every year.”
When his department presented the data from the first survey to school districts last year, Morris said, a disconnect became apparent between the resources available to students and students’ knowledge of how to access them. The city hopes to help work with outside groups to provide more resources but also help school districts advertise their own.
“We know that school counselors just don’t have the capacity or bandwidth to be able to meet those needs on a regular basis because they average 400 students per counselor at best,” Morris said. “But what we can see is, if we have more traumainformed adults in these spaces where they can just be finding connection and support … then when something does come up, they have a trusted adult in their corner. That’s huge.”
Morris also hopes that information from the survey will help with training to counsel adolescents with more empathy.
“We’re not giving the advice of like, ‘You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a breakup,’ ” Morris said. “The experiences and the level of intensity is at its highest during adolescence, so we need to make sure that we don’t minimize their experiences, but we understand that to them, this is the crisis.”
The city is considering more mobile care centers and wants to train more mental health professionals. The department also plans to give out “micro grants” of $3,000 for community members and groups to get creative in helping with the mental health of young people, an idea sparked by the youth commission.
“Just by opening up these applications, we’re going to be learning a lot more about what the community members want to do in order to support the youth and young adults they work with,” Morris said.
Working with young people to create the survey has had unexpected benefits, Morris said, including in learning how to market to younger populations. Putting ads on Instagram, for example, might be more effective than on Youtube, a platform on which many students have ad blockers.
Youth leaders also pushed for more nuance on identity description. For example, Morris said, the survey now lets respondents check categories such as “gender diverse” or “exploring and unsure,” which increases accuracy and makes them feel understood.
“Just seeing them light up when they see what they talk about with their friends on a citywide survey — this is the city-sanctioned survey, and they’re like, ‘This is one of the first times that I’ve seen this on any of these forms that I have to fill out.’ ”
The goal is to have big-picture results from the survey available in May, which is Mental Health Awareness Month, so youth commission members can present a report to City Council.