How virtual school is straining the mental health of WA students
Are the kids all right? Counselors and legislators want to know.
by Agueda Pacheco Flores
When Liz’s 17-year-old son started sleeping in until noon on the weekends and getting lost on YouTube for hours, she didn’t think much of it. She assumed it was something all teenagers did and — after all — her son didn’t act like the “typical solemn teenager,” avoiding eye contact and responding with one-word answers.
“My son always presents as very outgoing and chats a lot and has a very sunny disposition,” says Liz, who chose to withhold her last name to protect the identity of her son, a junior in a Bellevue School District high school. “As a parent, I thought, ‘Oh, he's not depressed. He chats and tells me how things are going.’ ”
But when her son was screened through Bellevue School District’s Mental Health Assistance Team during the fall of 2019 she learned he wasn’t doing well. He scored high for depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Bellevue’s MHAT program is used to screen all 10th graders, who are then referred by teachers and counselors if they score a certain level for the three conditions.
“I’m so thankful he had that screening and that resource was available. I just can’t imagine if that hadn’t happened,” Liz says.
Liz's son benefitted from an expansion of mental health support in Washington public schools that was taking place even before the pandemic. With the added pressures of 2020, that support has become even more critical.
Schools in Washington state were among the first in the country to pivot to virtual learning at the beginning of the pandemic last March. Alongside that disruption also came widespread economic uncertainty and major social isolation, as well as the coronavirus’ rising death toll. School counselors say the shift into pandemic life created an immediate call to arms, both because of the stress of virtual school and everything else young people are dealing with right now, at home and out in the world.
Few studies and surveys have thoroughly analyzed the mental health impacts of the pandemic on children and youth, but early available research reveals a crisis. A survey conducted by YoungMinds, a U.K.-based mental health charity, found that 83% of the 2,111 youth participants with previous mental health challenges said the pandemic had made their conditions worse. An Active Minds survey of 3,239 high school and college students found that 74% of students are struggling to keep a routine and that eight in 10 students are struggling with focus and avoiding distractions.
Multiple bills introduced during Washington state's current legislative session address mental health in schools and aim to bolster school counseling programs further.
After Liz’s son’s screening in fall 2019, a counselor reached out to her, and her son was promptly connected with services that are integrated into his school. When the pandemic began, his check-ins went virtual. Liz says because he had gotten help before the school went virtual, her son had no trouble staying in touch with his counselors.
“I’m really glad he had that going into COVID, I haven’t even thought about what COVID would have been like without that support,” Liz says, choking up over the phone.
Some of the challenges that come with online education — a lack of engagement and participation — are similar to the issues counselors see when they try to provide students with mental health help. School mental health specialists have found the virtual pivot to be at least as difficult for teachers as for students, especially because depression in and of itself pushes people to withdraw.
“Because [the switch to remote school] happened so quickly, there were a lot of adjustments … trying to figure out how we are going to do counseling with kids online; Are they going to show up? How authentic is it going to be?” says Kerince Bowen, Bellevue School District’s director of counseling. “Initially that was the big concern: how to get the kids to participate?”
So far, Bowen and other counselors have noticed, specifically with their MHAT program, that there are indeed far fewer tenth graders screening than in years past. Since students aren't answering the questions, MHAT counselors are struggling to identify which students need help. To some extent, she says, chuckling, counselors are borderline harassing students in order to check in on their mental well-being.
“It’s easier for kids to not check in because all they have to do is not log in and there's not much we can do,” Bowen says. “When you’re in a building you just walk down to the classroom and say, ‘Hey, come with me.’ They don’t really have much of a choice.”
Bowen says school mental health issues have many layers. First, the virtual nature of school is leading students to withdraw, even when they may or may not need extra help with their mental health. Additionally students avoid turning on their cameras, in class and in counseling, which makes it difficult for teachers and counselors to observe their behavior and read their body language, which could signal other issues. Learning from home also doesn’t offer the confidentiality and privacy that counseling offices usually provide when talking about sensitive topics around emotional and psychological struggles.
Georganna Sedlar, a consultant for Bellevue School District’s MHAT program, has been wondering, even worrying, about the many ways the pandemic has impacted the social and emotional development of children and youth.
Sedlar is a licensed clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in both the University of Washington’s departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the department of psychology. She says teens in particular are at a pivotal moment in their lives — developing their sense of being, forming their identities and oftentimes dealing with the awkward and angsty stage of adolescence.
Instead of getting feedback from their friends and social circles in person, everything this past year has become intensely digitally centered. She worries about students' overreliance on social media for connection and sense of worth, while those platforms have proven negative effects on teens’ self-esteem.
The list of emotional and psychological stressors do not end there.
“We have to appreciate that kids don’t exist in vacuums. They’re part of multiple systems and families,” Sedlar says. The other layers of the stress for youth include the impact COVID-19 has on parents, including financial stress and unemployment and the stress of working during the pandemic. Those stressors can be magnified when race is taken into account, she added.
“It’s profound just thinking about how kids are making sense of everything in their world,” Sedlar says.
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