The “Suicide” School

It’s a common joke among New York City high schoolers that Stuyvesant High School is the “Depression” school or the “Suicide” school. Teens laugh about the toll the stress and pressure of Stuyvesant has on mental health. My friends and I make these jokes all the time, stressing over a difficult exam or all the homework we have to do. For us, turning mental health into a joke has become a way of coping. The same is true for teenagers all over the city and the US. What’s strange is how despite all the attention on high school mental health, it’s still a huge issue that teens constantly struggle with.

One thing I’ve noticed in myself and my peers throughout high school is the confusion about what depression and anxiety mean. A year ago, I would’ve said depression was just feeling sad and anxiety was just feeling nervous, unaware that these issues are so much more complex than that. 

While a part of depression is long-lasting feelings of sadness, it can also cause the absence of feeling. A feeling of nothingness that takes away your motivation. But it can also cause outbursts of anger, irritable moods, self-criticism, and more. It can even cause memory issues and have physical impacts such as insomnia, excessive sleeping, body aches, and headaches. Depression can appear in many different forms, so it’s important to know some of these symptoms and warning signs. If you're unsure if what you're feeling is depression, the best thing to do is to reach out to someone. This could be your legal guardian, a therapist, a close friend, or a loved one.

The major eye-opener for me about dealing with mental health was my first therapy session. When I was younger, I thought therapy was only for people who had gone through a super traumatic experience, not something that was an option for everyone. But then in high school, I realized that a lot of people had therapists and that it can be a really helpful tool in managing mental health for anyone. Despite becoming more comfortable with the idea of therapy, it was still about a year and a half before I mustered up the courage to ask my parents to see a therapist. Looking back, it’s crazy to me that I didn’t start therapy earlier given the intrusive thoughts I was struggling with. The remaining stigma surrounding therapy in my brain definitely prevented me from getting help sooner. 

My first session was at the beginning of Junior year. My palms were sweaty and I kept tinkering with the straps on my backpack. Why was I even bothering with this? Was therapy going to be as pointless as that one mindfulness class my mom had put me in? I stuck close to my mom when we walked into my therapist's office–which is actually very warm and homey and not at all office-like–and avoided my therapist’s face, keeping my eyes pinned to the floor. I’m sure my therapist could sense my nerves, and she made me feel at home right away. She smiled a bunch and made lots of jokes, and didn’t force me to tell her anything I wasn’t comfortable with. I could feel myself relaxing more and more with her, to the point where we sent my mom off to the waiting room while we chatted. It was then that my therapist said something that changed my entire perspective on mental health.

She explained how everyone has protector parts in their brain to keep them safe from both physical and mental harm, but sometimes these protector parts can go into overdrive and make things worse for you. This doesn’t mean that these parts are evil and out to get you, it means the opposite. These protector parts just want to keep you safe, and all you need to do is learn how to communicate with them.

Anxiety is a similar concept. Everyone experiences some level of anxiety and that’s totally healthy. Anxiety is only there to protect us, but when there is too much anxiety, it becomes unhelpful. When you experience excessive anxiety, you can feel queasy, have trouble breathing, and more. Excessive anxiety can appear in many forms from social anxiety to a specific phobia. Many tools can help manage anxiety, and having a therapist can also be super helpful. My Anxious Mind: A Teen’s Guide to Managing Anxiety and Panic by Michael A. Tompkins and Katherine Martinez has a lot of these tools as well as a much more in-depth explanation of anxiety and its many forms.

The COVID-19 pandemic had many, huge impacts on our world; One of these impacts was that it exacerbated teens' struggles with mental health. In the US, the percentage of children, ages three to seventeen, diagnosed with anxiety and depression increased by 25.5% from 2016 to 2020, and in New York alone it increased by 22.5%. Being isolated from peers and dealing with the normal stress of high school compounded with the pandemic was detrimental to teen mental health, and a lot of teens don’t have access to mental health care. We can’t even begin to tackle teen anxiety and depression without providing help for those who want and need it. 

Many states have taken some steps toward battling this mental health crisis. California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina have passed legislation allocating funding for mental health services in schools, and Virginia now requires school counselors to receive specified mental health training in order to be licensed or to renew their licenses. Connecticut also requires boards of education to give students the option of up to four mental health days per school year. New York was even the first to require schools to teach about mental health in 2018 with the amendment of the Education Law. Yet, despite all this, the mental health crisis continues to be, well, a crisis.

Policymakers need to prioritize mental health support and education in schools. Legislation raising the amount of health care professionals in schools, ideally to form a ratio of 250:1, students to professionals, in accordance with the American School Counselor Association, is necessary. Currently, most New York City schools fail to meet this ratio, and, according to a recent audit from state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the DOE doesn’t enforce the Education Law or require mental health training for school staff. This audit recommends that the DOE create a monitoring mechanism to ensure schools are complying with the Education law, require mental health training for staff, and create a system to collect mental health-related information from schools to make more informed decisions. These measures would go a long way to combat the mental health crisis among teens.

The most important thing is to get rid of this stigma surrounding mental health. Teens need to be well-informed and to feel comfortable coming to a school counselor or guardian for help. School staff also need to be more aware and understanding of teen mental health struggles. A lot of steps toward progress in this direction are already being made and we need to make sure policymakers keep pushing for these improvements.