High schoolers hope to bring change to mental health issues

Area students’ mental health better than state average; students still struggling

In light of a mental health crisis, some Forest Lake Area High School students have rallied to help students feel more open, connected and safe when talking about mental health, especially following the pandemic when the situation plummeted to new depths.

“I think it was probably just as important before, but I don’t think people took action as much as we do now. The pandemic definitely showed everybody, ‘We should probably be telling people there’s resources,’” said Grace Olson, a high school student council member.

Members of the student council and National Honor Society formed an annual mental health week at the high school three years ago to raise awareness and build support for those struggling.

“The older, other generations haven’t really grown up with this [conversation], so I don’t think we’re 100% going to see how this has really impacted our generation and the younger generations, and I think it’ll definitely be a positive impact,” said junior Kristina Stoyke, who is a member of both the student council and NHS.

The high school’s mental health week helps students connect over movies like “Inside Out,” a Pixar-animated film which features emotions, and also offers a space for students to bond over their shared difficulties.

“We’re trying to show that they have resources if they need them and that you’re supported and you matter,” Olson said.

The two joked that they know how high schoolers can be aloof, and say they understand that not every student is excited about activities related to mental health.

“There’s definitely those two different groups that I’ve seen, but the ones that do choose to [participate] definitely have a lot of fun,” NHS member Jonathan Rink said.

How it got started

A similar program was brought to elementary schools last year when a high school student acquired a grant by The Education Foundation of the Forest Lake Area to teach age-appropriate mental health classes to younger students, Rink said. Unlike the high school’s mental health week, which has been going on since the spring of 2021, there is one day that student council and national honors society students teach a lesson and guide an activity to explain mental illness.

When they created the lesson plans, Rink explained that they asked themselves “How can we apply this to little kids’ lives?” and considered what tools they can give them to feel strong mentally in the future.

All the students involved in guiding the elementary mental health day last year loved the eagerness the elementary students brought to the class.

“Kids have no filter, and they would just ask about mental health. They’d talk about their personal lives and their parents and siblings,” said junior Allie Hunter, student council and NHS member.

“They’re more aware than I expected,” Olson added.

This year, the student council and NHS had to brainstorm ways to ensure the elementary school mental health day could continue for years without the help of the grant that kick started the program last year.

The ability to help peers or younger students feel safe and comfortable talking about mental health struggles in the future, rather than carrying the burden alone, is what they hope their work will offer.

“I’m excited that we are starting it with the younger generations, just so they can grow up throughout all of their school years learning about mental health, and hopefully, theirs will be better,” Olson said.

For Olson, who remembers not fully understanding her anxiety while growing up, laughed that something as simple as reading the children’s book “Wilma Jean the Worry Machine,” a book about anxiety, could have at least defined what she felt.

“It probably would have helped me. It’s probably a good thing that we’re doing that now,” Olson said.

Hunter echoed a similar sentiment about dealing with anxiety while growing up without any understanding of what it is and how it made her feel alone and isolated.

“I didn’t even want to talk to my parents about it,” Hunter said, adding if she had known other people around her were experiencing the same feeling, “that would have made such a big difference.”

The increased isolation from friends and time to self-reflect was harder for them during the pandemic-restriction year. They hope that endorsing open dialogue about mental health is a step in the right direction for their generation and future ones to recover and be better than older generations.

“I feel weird saying, ‘Adults these days don’t know about mental health,’ but it’s very normalized to keep things in. … I’m glad that our generation is opening up to things like that,” Hunter said.

The crisis

Based on the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey, taken by fifth, eighth, ninth and 11th graders every three years, students struggling with anxiety and depression is at an all-time high since the survey began in 1989.

“[Officials are] seeing the children’s youth mental health crisis around the world, not just here,” said Sue Abderholden, the executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness Minnesota.

The most recent Minnesota Student Survey shows that 28.5% of Forest Lake 11th graders reported long-term mental health challenges in 2022, an increase from 2019’s 25.7%. However, Forest Lake 11th graders reported fewer mental health challenges than the state average of 32.7% of them experiencing long-term mental health challenges in 2022 versus 26.5% in 2019.

When Abderholden saw the state averages, she felt “truly worried” about how students are feeling in the wake of the pandemic.

“All the positive mental well-being components dropped significantly from 2016. That was certainly a concern,” Abderholden said.

Across the board, students experiencing anxiety have increased in Forest Lake in 2022 compared to what students reported in the 2019 survey. For example, in 2022, 61.7% of eighth graders reported feeling anxious at least several days in the previous two weeks, while 48.6% of eighth graders felt anxious several days or more in 2019. Similar increases are seen for ninth and 11th graders.

There are many factors that play into how or why someone experiences mental health struggles, and Abderholden believes the pandemic worsened the mental health of many. She said youth not only didn’t know how to deal with how disruptive the pandemic was to daily schedules, but they also didn’t have tools to manage stress and anxiety.

“If you think about what happened, kids lost their routine. … If you think about teenagers in particular, this is a key time of their development, in terms of this is when you start moving away from your parents and connecting to your peers, and they weren’t there,” Abderholden said.

There’s no easy remedy to help every student facing mental challenges like anxiety and depression, but Abderholden thinks teaching and learning more about mental illness can help. Locally, Lakes Center for Youth and Families therapists who work in the school district are working with students who are struggling and giving them tools to help them manage how they feel.

LC4YF therapist Jenny Valkos thinks therapeutic programs can be helpful to young people, but daily routines of waking up, attending school or extracurriculars, paired with a good sleep schedule can move the needle.

“I can use all of these fancy interventions with kids and we can work on everything, but if they’re not meeting their basic needs of getting sleep and a good diet, it’s so hard,” Valkos said.

One of the therapeutic measures another LC4YF and school therapist Jessica Szmanda has implemented is teaching students, as young as 6 or 7, how the brain reacts and processes information. When a triggering or traumatic event happens, the human brain switches from its rational thought process, in the prefrontal cortex, to a fight-or-flight response, in the amygdala, she explained.

“They’re able to tell you when they’re about to flip their lid, when they’re about to go from their prefrontal cortex thinking to their amygdala thinking,” Szmanda said.

Teaching students how to understand that switch and why it’s happening to them can help students regulate emotions and become more emotionally intelligent.

In working with students in Forest Lake for the past few years, Szmanda thinks it’s important for adults in the community to create safe spaces for young people to open up about what they’re going through.

“I think that our teen population just wants a place to go and be heard, and to talk and feel safe in doing so,” Szmanda said.

NAMI of Minnesota offers mental health support. More information about services can be found online at nami.org.