In recent years, mental health has been a topic at the forefront of the greater conversations surrounding general health, technology, and education. Schools like LASA have a reputation of pushing for academic excellence in their students, and with this expectation for excellence comes widespread experiences of chronic stress, fatigue, and anxiety among the student population. Both schoolwide and statewide initiatives have been forwarded to help students specifically recognize, cope with, and manage mental health issues.
Dylan George is a high school senior and Gold Award-winning Girl Scout who created a mental health curriculum at a local nonprofit and has experience in the mental health and neuroscience fields through teaching, observations, and field work. She discussed how interdisciplinary activities that mesh mental health and her love of theater helped her get into the field.
“I auditioned for this acting troupe with Planned Parenthood, called Teenage Communication Theater (TCT),” George said. “We’re a group of teenagers in an acting group, and we go to different parts of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and we teach theater peer education about relationships or mental health. We’ll talk about suicide and what to do if you’re ever in that situation, or resources to call.”
An important aspect of mental health is building a community of people who care, according to George. In many ways, this includes friends noticing changes in behaviors symptomatic of mental health issues, which can appear in many forms.
“We talk a lot about how to recognize your friends,” George said. “If your friend seems more distant, or if they change their eating and sleeping habits, or behavioral changes, and you just notice they’re not talking as much in social situations.”
Mental illness is an umbrella term for over 200 disorders, according to the Cleveland Clinic. This means they can present in completely different ways depending on the person and what they’re struggling with, according to LASA Wellness Counselor Olga Alverado.
“Frequent complaints of stomach aches, feeling nauseated, headaches, not being able to focus,” Alverado said. “Other students [present] very fidgety, or they could be very lethargic. It kind of goes [from] one extreme to the other.”
To many people, confronting a friend is the hard part. In a joint study by CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation, about one-third of respondents said they are “not too comfortable” or “not at all comfortable” discussing their mental health with friends. There’s a thin line between being curious and being intrusive in a mental health discussion, according to George. While confrontation can be difficult, it’s a necessary step in the process to a healthier mind, according to Healthline, and there are ways to do so while still being sensitive.
“Not in public, not in front of other people,” George said. “Telling them that you’re here to talk and that you’re here for them will make them feel more comfortable to bring it up rather than if you ask really specific questions—it might seem intrusive.”
Today, only 48% of kids discuss mental health with their parents regularly, according to a study by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). While it’s become normalized to blame the child for this, the parent has the responsibility to initiate mental health conversations, according to NAMI. If this doesn’t happen, there are other options, according to George.
“If it’s severe, there’s a lot of hotlines, but if you can talk to a school counselor, those are really helpful because it’s outside of the family,” George said. “Maybe it’s not a family member, but a trusted adult, if you have that type of person, or a teacher that you can talk to.”
While things like LASA schoolwork and social pressures can be the causes of many mental health struggles, recent data by Girl Scouts of the USA showed that loneliness can start as early as 5 years old, with 64% of girls ages 5-7 reporting feelings of loneliness. Dr. Christine Crawford is a practicing psychiatrist and mental health expert who discussed the impact this early feeling can have.
“When kids, as young as five and six, are experiencing loneliness, it can unfortunately put them on a trajectory in which they might evolve into developing more serious mental health conditions,” Crawford said. “We really have to be intentional about this … There are so many kids that I see in my clinic who are living in these households with multiple siblings, multiple parents, multiple adults, and nobody in that house notices that kid. Nobody in that house notices what it looks like when that kid is struggling. And so these kids are suffering in silence, surrounded by so many people.”
Many mental health crises, like loneliness, are complex, and sometimes the root cause may not be understandable or visible to others. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist to the person going through the problem, according to Crawford. Many times, friends and family will notice changes in behavior but create excuses that deny mental health crises, Crawford mentioned, but she added that there are ways for people to check themselves when they notice these changes.
“If you see somebody, say something, and I really, really mean that, because it can be really hard as a parent to see your kids struggling, to bear witness to their suffering,” Crawford said. “As a defense mechanism, sometimes we turn a blind eye. But you denying what it is you’re actually seeing with your eyes is going to have a negative impact on [the] kid. When we turn a blind eye to something that’s right in front of us, we’re doing that only in service of ourselves in our own discomfort.”
