The graduating 22-year-old Wright State University student has come a long way since her initial diagnosis.
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Because she’s dealt with her own mental health problems for so long, she has also seen a switch in the way her friends talk about mental health.
Back in eighth grade, when she was first diagnosed, Ricker said she didn’t want to talk about it with her friends. They didn’t seem to understand. She said she felt like telling them would make her a burden.
But when the pandemic hit, she said mental health became a much bigger topic of conversation.
Approximately one in four children ages 3 to 17 across the U.S. reported one or more mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral problems in 2021 and 2022 according to Health Policy Institute of Ohio data released this month. In the same years, nearly one in three Ohio children from households earning less than the federal poverty level reported a mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral problem.
There are still a number of challenges to improving kids’ mental health in the region. Five key findings came from the Dayton Daily News’s six-month reporting project Mental Health Matters: Kids in Crisis.
- Unlimited access to cellphones and social media is worsening mental health for youth, magnifying conflicts with their peers and making adolescents, especially teenage girls, feel inadequate.
- While public awareness around mental health in kids has improved, there’s still a need for more awareness and for kids not to feel stigmatized when they have an issue with mental health. Counselors and doctors say they often see kids who have been dealing with issues for years but have not yet gotten help until a dramatic shift occurs.
- Frontline health care workers, like pediatricians, doctor’s office nurses and primary care physicians are key in getting kids access to mental health care early. More training is needed to help these health care workers.
- Some schools have adopted practices to get kids mental health care that other schools could look to emulate.
- While there’s been a lot of progress and meeting of needs, there’s still a larger need at a time when funding for mental health is running low. The Montgomery County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board has decreased its funding toward prevention services, and the federal COVID-19 funds that schools received and used to bolster their budgets is now spent.
Credit: Marshall Gorby
Cellphones
While cellphones and social media can help people connect, being chronically online or never putting the phone down can lead to negative outcomes for youth.
If people are getting dopamine ― a type of neurotransmitter mostly responsible for giving you “feel good” feelings ― through social media, they could be seeking more reactions, notifications and people liking and responding to their content. That can lead to a potentially unhealthy cycle of seeking reward or validation, according to a local neuropsychologist.
Parents and adults need to teach and show kids how to use technology in moderation and in a positive, healthy manner. Many parents are already making the effort to help their teens regulate their use of technology.
Parents in the region told the Dayton Daily News how they limit their own uses of cellphones, such as establishing a place to “park” their phones to give them a break from scrolling endlessly or checking for more notifications.
Heather Emmert, a Brookville parent of a 15-year-old, said she restricts the access her son, Eitan Emmert, has to social media. If he is watching TikTok, it’s on her phone, she said. She said she and Eitan have discussed it, and while Eitan would love to have social media for access to memes, he can also see what his friends deal with.
“We’re just very open about the dangers of it, and he sees what his friends deal with, having that constant access to one another,” Emmert said.
This year, multiple area school districts heavily restricted cellphones in high schools and middle schools so kids can’t easily access them during the school day. Those schools say it’s working.
“I think it’s really hard for parents these days because they didn’t grow up with social media, so they don’t sometimes understand how it works, understand the danger in it, and understand how to help their kids use it in a safe manner,” said Dr. Kelly Blankenship, associate chief medical officer of behavioral health at Dayton Children’s Hospital.
Credit: Marshall Gorby
Mental health stigma
While mental health is becoming more of a priority, there is a lingering stigma surrounding mental health that has hindered or delayed youth in the area from seeking treatment, teens and families in the region told the Dayton Daily News.
For Charlie Pope, a teen in Greenville, she found that medication was part of the help she needed in order to manage her depression, but to get to the point where she could ask for help, she needed to overcome the stigma around mental health.
At times prior to seeking help, Pope felt like she didn’t have a reason to be depressed, so she put off addressing her depression. While outside factors can influence mental health, many types of mental health conditions can have genetic components that increase the risk of creating a chemical imbalance and developing a disorder.
Jake Long, a sixth-grade student at Bellbrook Middle School, joined his school’s Hope Squad because he wanted to help people. He said he encourages his fellow students to be more serious about mental health.
“If you’re joking about it, you don’t know if they’re being serious,” Long said.
He said Hope Squad makes people feel more comfortable in school and talking about mental health.
“Normalizing that conversation is so important with our youth and our young adults, and just really thinking about having those conversations before you think there’s a problem,” said Barb Marsh, director of Counseling and Wellness Services at Wright State University.
Health care system
Navigating the mental health system can be difficult if you don’t know where to start.
Parents from across the region told the Dayton Daily News that even when they realized their child needed help, it was difficult to get their kid into counseling. More mental health workers are needed.
There’s also a problem with diversity in the medical system, said Tristyn Ball, director of prevention and early intervention at Montgomery County ADAMHS. Having a mental health provider with a similar background to the patient can help the patient be more comfortable seeking help, she said.
Emmert, the Brookville parent, is currently in school at Wright State University studying to become a licensed counselor. She is also deaf, and said she found it difficult in getting her own help when she realized she had obsessive compulsive disorder because people didn’t understand what being deaf was like.
“Not having access to effective accommodations really impacts mental health,” Emmert said.
Blankenship said screening in schools, pediatric offices and family practices is key, as well as building resiliency in people and kids.
“I would love to be out of a job, honestly,” Blankenship said. “If kids no longer needed mental health services, that would be wonderful.”
School system
Student mental health started to trend downward in 2016, coinciding with the opioid epidemic. In 2019, the Memorial Day tornado and the Oregon District shooting in August hit the region hard. Montgomery County education leaders were already beginning to think about how to change the way schools dealt with mental health, but after 2020, the need grew.
It’s increasingly common for high schools to have a Hope Squad, which is a student-run organization supported by adults that helps identify kids who might need interventions.
Bryce Elmeier, an eighth-grade student in Bellbrook Middle School’s Hope Squad, said he thinks Hope Squad makes a direct impact on the health of the school. There haven’t been a lot of fights, he said, and there are few people sitting alone at lunch.
“It’s just keeping a positive vibe in school,” he said.
Margaret Bailey, a University of Dayton pre-medicine student, said her work in Hope Squad in Cincinnati’s Seton High School sparked her interest in mental health. She is now the mental health officer for UD emergency medical services, a student-run emergency medical service.
“Especially everything that happened with COVID-19 in 2020 and how that negatively impacted a lot of my peer’s mental health, I thought if there’s something I can do to make a difference, I would want to be that difference for them,” she said.
More school districts have hired mental health counselors, rather than just guidance counselors. Schools now have posters everywhere to advertise the 988 number, which is the crisis hotline number.
Other common practices that many schools have adopted include trauma-informed care, a practice of understanding that trauma is common and how to respond to traumatized kids, structured freshman seminars that require students to get to know and understand each other better, and coaches who are just as involved with kids’ mental health as their teachers.
Lack of funds
While there’s more understanding and practice around mental health, the funding that is offered is trickling away.
Federal COVID-19 funds for school districts expire this year. The funds were not commonly used to fund mental health practices, but they helped pad districts’ bottom lines while dealing with mental health problems and learning loss.
Additionally, funding for prevention services is limited. In an effort to reduce spending, Montgomery County ADAMHS reduced the amount of funding it gave toward prevention services in 2024. Multiple agencies reliant on the Human Services Levy have said their organizations are struggling and in need of more funding, saying the need is related to an uptick in demand for services and an increase in costs for delivering those services, among other challenges.
Greta Mayer, CEO of the Mental Health and Recovery Board of Clark, Greene and Madison Counties, said her organization is one of the biggest funders of mental health assistance in the community. But many of the organizations she works with are already working with multiple organizations and task forces.
“Their staff are stretched thin,” Mayer said. “There may be openings, and they have to work extra hours to be able to see the people who are coming through their doors.”
Ball said focusing on preventative measures and early intervention programs can identify risk factors early, so kids aren’t dealing with complex mental health issues later in life.
“If prevention services and services, services for youth, continue to be the first thing that get cut from budgets when we have to make budget cuts, this will be an even bigger issue for the next generation of social workers, taxpayers and community leaders,” Ball said.
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