Social media, bullying, violence fuel mental health crisis among high school students

Last year, two days after Thanksgiving, Bre’Yanna Thompson’s childhood friend was gunned down in Harrisburg.

Thompson was traumatized by the slaying of Tay’Andre Warren, whom she had known since sixth grade.

One year later, Thompson, who is 18, struggles to focus on school.

“Every day is rough,” said the Harrisburg High School senior. “Sometimes I feel overwhelmed emotionally. When you have that connection with someone, it just hurts you. It makes you want to cry. It makes you angry.”

Zachary Smith, now an 18-year-old senior at Central York High School, had endured his most difficult life challenge during his junior year: the loss of his father to complications from the coronavirus.

For months he bounced between not being able to fall asleep and not being able to get out of bed.

“Even when I got out of bed and went to school, there were so many things that reminded me of my dad that were so amplified,” Smith said. “I was so emotionally unstable and emotionally a wreck. Being able to focus on AP classes, honors classes ... sometimes I felt it was impossible and I was going to have to break away from school and not move on to the next grade.”

Emotional hardships such as these would be trying for anyone, but when compounded by the onslaught of mass shootings, a global pandemic and culture wars, the distress for some young people has been life-altering.

Smith and Thompson put on brave faces and persevered through pain, but their collective experience speaks to a national mental health crisis among young people – especially in Pennsylvania. This year’s graduating class arguably has lived through some of the most tumultuous events and social forces in recent times.

Study after study has sounded the alarm over the emotional and mental crisis gripping American teenagers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 1 in 5 high school students reported witnessing violence in their communities. The National Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that almost 60% of teenage girls felt persistently sad or hopeless. One third of female students reported having considered suicide in the past year; more than 13% said they had attempted suicide.

In another troubling finding, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) earlier this month published a report that found that mental health-related visits to emergency rooms by teenagers and young adults had spiked in the past decade. Suicide-related visits accounted for the biggest increase.

More than 2.7 million young people are suffering from severe mental illness - a large percentage of them are found in Pennsylvania, according to Mental Health America. The advocacy organization ranks Pennsylvania third in the nation for the number of young people dealing with at least one major depressive disorder.

“You have the pandemic, the role of social media, the covid landscape that created divisiveness and contention and animosity in communities,” said Dr. Jason Pedersen, a school psychologist in the Derry Township School District.

“We had so much anger and rage. You saw the rage play out. You see the gun violence. All of this has an impact on the mental health of students. It’s not just their final grade. It’s everything going on.”

A generation defined

The isolation, bullying, violence and the distress of negotiating everything from social media to family life may yet come to define a generation.

The fallout of the pandemic looms large in that equation.

“It created a whole new set of stressors,” Pedersen said. “It put a microscope on everything. For everyone there was a lot of stress involved because of the uncertainty. We had people experiencing family members losing jobs or financial insecurity and food insecurity and people being physically ill and dying. Those things added to the stress. It was a difficult time for everyone.”

Pedersen points out, 20 years ago, when the school day ended, any issues that a young person may have been dealing with — with peers or even adults — were set aside for the evening. Today everyone is available — or logged on — most of the time.

“If you didn’t happen to live in the neighborhood, you might not see them,” Pedersen said. “That was a nice break for people. The break has gone away. You see a lot of students that are having difficulties with their peers, well that difficulty follows them on Instagram or whatever app is being used or text is being used all throughout the evening and day.”

Smith and Thompson said they worry constantly about gun violence.

Gun violence has been a fixture throughout Thompson’s high school career. The senseless killing of her lifelong friend marked the 21st homicide last year in Harrisburg, which record the highest number of annual killings in at least 36 years.

“Street violence is getting out of hand,” Thompson said. “I’m lost for words for how to describe it... kids running around killing each other. That is my biggest fear. A mass shooting in our school.”

Smith said he too often wonders if “this is the day this happens at my school.”

“It is absolutely horrifying to go to school and, in the back of my head, there always lingers this thought that this might be the day that my school gets shot up,” he said. “Mentally, I can’t comprehend why this is happening and we are not doing something to stop it.”

Studies show drills designed to prepare students for mass shootings have an adverse impact on students’ mental health, with up to 42% of students reporting increased levels of anxiety, stress, and depression following drills.

And the escalating national divide has left students feeling caught in the middle.

“I don’t want to undermine the problems that other generations have gone through but facing a global pandemic that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and seeing the older generation fight and argue instead of coming together and thinking of a solution was heartbreaking,” Smith said.

“The older generation could have done something. They could have come together and put aside their political biases and come together as human beings and work together to save the nation, but they chose to argue, accuse and blame and produce such, such hate into our country that ended up dividing us.”

Retreating into silence

Some young people are emotionally paralyzed by the weight of the stress.

Tania Leader, a parent in the Lower Dauphin School District, this spring spoke at a forum on behalf of dozens of students afraid to air their mental health concerns about escalating tensions around race and sexual identity.

Some of the reflections Leader read - amid her own tears - were written by students who admitted having suicidal thoughts.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Leader said. “This is something real and very serious. I feel a lot of these children maybe don’t have a parent at home that they can talk to about these things.”

The Lower Dauphin School District community was forced to reckon with these issues when a Black student and his family braved the public forum to share their story of racial intimidation.

Delali Jamison, whose son Kamau Johnson was the target of relentless bullying, laid bare the enormity of the impact on her family. Jamison recently told PennLive that her son’s mental and emotional well being had been profoundly wounded by the experience. She planned to pull her son out of school and move out of the area.

Jamison declined to speak for this article.

The Jamison’s experience paved the way for more students and parents to air their concerns.

“We know that a lot of our students have mental health issues due to bullying,” Leader said. “It’s not specific to discrimination. It’s about how you dress. What you look like. Their weight. There are so many reasons for bullying.”

As a parent and Central York school board member, Milsten worries that young people are not taken seriously when they voice their mental health concerns.

“A lot of times adults dismiss teenage issues and problems as hormones run amok and they downplay what is actually going on,” said Milsten. “There might not be the financial wherewithal in the family. Also you could have parents who don’t believe this is a real problem and ignore it, and just say ‘It’s hormones. You are just being ridiculous. You are being immature. Get over yourself.” I know that happens in people’s homes.”

The mother of a 16-year old transgender boy, Milsten is sensitive to the myriad challenges that young people face - especially those negotiating such life-altering issues.

“In addition to all the other issues that come up with teens in that period of time so full of hormonal and scary changes, he is also experiencing gender dysphoria and trying to figure out who he is,” she said. “It’s hard enough to be ‘quote, unquote’ a regular kid in high school but then add that to it - it can cause all sorts of mental health crises.”

For many, schools offer the only help

Schools are increasingly redefining their role in helping young people negotiate tough times.

The vast majority of young people - 85% - rely on their schools for mental health intervention and counseling, yet schools are woefully understaffed.

Pennsylvania schools on average have 1 mental health worker to 1,600 students. The recommended ratio is 1 to 500.

“There is plenty of work to go around,” Pedersen said. “It’s a fairly big issue.”

His district has about a 1-1,200 student-to-counselor ratio.

“We do a pretty good job. There are only three of us,” Pedersen said.

Most schools have an assistance program for students experiencing significant mental health issues. Often, districts will refer families to county agencies or private health providers for additional help.

Students spend the bulk of their awake time in school, so it falls on schools to provide the first line of response.

David Christopher, superintendent of the Cumberland Valley School District, has spearheaded several strategies to address the mental and emotional health crisis among students.

For starters, students were surveyed about their biggest stressors. What caused them the most anxiety? Lack of hope about the future.

“They felt unsure,” said Christopher. “That lack of confidence was really a major concern to them. They didn’t feel settled in terms of what their opportunities would be as they left us.... Those same students were telling us we know we can get into a good school, but we’re not sure that is going to be enough. Are we going to be alright?”

Christopher acknowledges that his district is ranked among the highest performing districts in the state - but said that should not be its overriding distinction.

“We can point to all these factors that are happening, certainly as an aggregate they have an impact, but when you have 60% of high school students - especially girls - saying that they are persistently sad, that should be a major wake up call to everybody in the United States,” Christopher said. “That says something’s not right. We can’t have two-thirds of our young women saying things like that across the country.”

Cumberland Valley is weighing the merits of class ranking. The district over time has found that ranking students has been a source of great anxiety for students.

“We are going to have some real conversations with our community,” Christopher said. “Really, what is the purpose of school? Is it to rank and sort kids or to make sure all kids are learning? Those are two separate functions.”

Prioritizing mental health

Milsten implores lawmakers to prioritize funding for school-based mental health programs, which have been slashed by budget shortfalls.

“I’m always concerned that the kids that fall through the cracks are the ones we are going to hear about and we’ll say, “I wish there was something we could have done. Something more. I wish somebody would have said something,’” Milsten said. “There were probably warning signs and people ignored them. That’s my biggest fear.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro has committed to bolstering funding for school-based mental health programs in his budget, proposing $500 million over five years to fund counselors and services.

“For too long, mental health has been treated as an afterthought,” Jeffrey Fuller, deputy secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, wrote in an op-ed for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “Even worse, an unfortunate stigma has arisen around people asking for help. We are now left with a situation where the need for mental health care is especially acute for our children.”

Smith and Thompson said they have been forever changed not only by their personal experiences, but those other forces.

“You have to put your emotions aside but sometimes it all just gets mixed. It impacts us. We are depressed,” Thompson said. “You can see on our faces...that we are hurting.”

Smith said few of his contemporaries have been spared: “People put on a brave face but deep down inside we are hurting. We are all hurting about something. It’s just a willingness to admit you are hurting.”

Need help: Mental health challenges can range from anxiety and sadness to thoughts of suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, seek help. Speak to your parents or guardian, or a trusted teacher or friend.

•Call 911: If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

•Call 988: Get connected to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988.

•Crisis Text Line: Get 24/7 help from the Crisis Text Line . Text PA to 741741 to start the conversation.

•PA Crisis Hotlines: Find a crisis line in your county.

Pennsylvania runs a Support & Referral Helpline that connects Pennsylvanians with mental and emotional support and to local resources. Call 855-284-2494 (TTY: 724-631-5600).

The United Way also provides crisis services, hotlines and warmlines. Call 211 to get connected.

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