Ecosystems of Care: Mental Health & Wellbeing in Schools
May 18, 2023
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To mark the beginning of this year’s Mental Health Awareness month, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an 85-page advisory declaring loneliness a new public health epidemic in the United States. The report states,
“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” Murthy goes on to say, “the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished. Loneliness and isolation represent profound threats to our health and well-being.” (Murthy, 2023)
The effects of this widespread loneliness and disconnection can be seen in these alarming statistics on youth mental health:
Depression and anxiety are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents, and suicide is among the leading causes of death in people aged 15–19 years (World Heath Organization, April 2023)
1 in 6 U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year; nearly 1 in 3 of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. (CDC)
In 2021, 37% of high school students experienced poor mental health (CDC):
42% of students reported feeling persistently sad or hopelessness in the past year (CDC)
Nearly 60% of female students and nearly 70% of those who identified as LGBQTIA+ reported persistent sadness and hopelessness (CDC)
While this data was gathered in 2021 at the height of pandemic isolation, trends that preceded the pandemic were similarly concerning (CDC).
At the National Equity Project, we define educational equity as every young person receiving what they need to develop to their full social, emotional, and intellectual potential. To make progress toward this aspiration, we need to listen and respond to what young people are telling us they need now and take seriously what we know from the science of learning and development. Protecting young people from adversity, promoting socio-emotional learning and psychological well-being, and ensuring access to mental health care are critical for their health and well-being during adolescence, and shape long-term outcomes into adulthood. Data suggests systemic conditions are contributing to individual and collective suffering, and systemic responses are needed.
Young people in the NEP-BELE District Network have shared with us that while they may feel connected and safe in one classroom or with one teacher, their experience of the school day overall is often overwhelming and isolating. We have heard that school feels like something they need to endure. And when students are having bad days, often no one notices - or worse they end up being judged, penalized or isolated for not performing at their best. Some students report not having even one adult at school they feel they could go to with a problem.
Why These Trends?
There is no single cause for the sharp declines in how our young people are faring; there are many contributing factors including:
A global pandemic that resulted in significant disruptions to school, activities, and friendships, and increased economic stress on families; 140,000 children in the U.S. lost a primary caregiver to Covid and children of color accounted for 65% of those losses (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2021)
A devastating uptick in mass shootings and rampant gun violence
A polarized and divisive sociopolitical context rife with ‘othering’ narratives and attacks on whole groups of people, including people of color, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people and women
An unrelenting focus on individual achievement and narrow definitions of success; valuing competition over cooperation and individualism at the expense of collectivism and the community good
Social media that takes us away from the present moment, promotes comparison, and is full of distorted images of what the ideal tween or teen should look like and be doing.
The Impact on Nervous Systems
Taken together, the context in which young people are growing up is changing rapidly, full of uncertainty and real and perceived threat. The stress many young people and families are experiencing is causing chronic physiological arousal, meaning that our nervous systems are spending less time in a state of calm, rest, and repair and more time in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. These nervous system responses are hard wired and designed to ensure our survival during acute stress. The problem is, when the stress is prolonged, as is the case with worry about physical safety or on-going abuse, daily microaggressions due to racism and other forms of marginalization, and persistent loneliness and isolation, our systems get stuck on “on” called hyperarousal (hypervigilant and using precious energy to scan for threat) or stuck on “off” called hypoarousal, overwhelmed to the point of shutting down and numbing.
This state of chronic physiological arousal causes impairments in our nervous system functioning and in the parts of the brain that control cognition, decision making, anxiety and mood, making it more difficult to concentrate, take in new content or ideas, and connect with others. We leave what Dr. Dan Siegel calls our “window of tolerance” (Siegel, 1999), the state of nervous system arousal in which we are able to function and thrive in everyday life. Chronic stress shows up in our bodies in the form of stomach pain, fatigue, muscle tension, and headaches.
What this looks like on any given day for a child or adolescent varies dramatically depending on their felt sense of safety, the context and their unique temperament. For some young people, dissociating or “tuning out” is a primary coping mechanism to move away from emotional pain. For others who are on hyper-alert for signs of danger, a fight response such as yelling, tantrumming, or picking fights is more common. Still others won’t show any outward signs of distress, but are suffering silently with chronic states of anxiety and/or depression. Some will turn to alcohol and drugs to soothe painful feelings.
The Antidote: Meaning and Connectedness
Young people in the NEP network have also shared that when educators do express genuine care for who they are as people, and when they have input into what and how they learn, they feel more connected and more motivated. The good news here is that educators and other adults have enormous power to shape learning contexts and influence students’ experiences within those contexts and thereby improve student well-being and learning. Young people have ideas about what they need, and when schools are responsive to what they ask for, their engagement increases. The meaningful connections they seek align with what research suggests is most needed to counter the mental health crisis faced by youth and adults today.
We need to start prioritizing the basic social neurobiological need all humans have for meaningful connection. Schools need to become places that first and foremost ensure and cultivate safety, belonging, purpose, and agency - not in place of academic learning, but so that everyone can meaningfully engage in learning.
Promoting Connectedness and Well-being: What Educators and Youth Serving Adults Can Do
We can start by talking about mental health, what it is, what happens to our brains and bodies under chronic stress, how impairments to mental health impact all aspects of our lives, and what we can do to care for our mental health and collective well-being.
According to Gabor Mate, physician, addiction and trauma specialist, and author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, we can normalize and show the common humanity of mental health challenges by not leaving people alone to think there is something terribly wrong with them or with a family member who is suffering. Most people struggling with mental health are ordinary human beings whose ‘symptoms’ are normal responses to abnormal circumstances. Circumstances, Mate argues, which often de-prioritize connection and which have become common in our society, but are not ‘normal’ from an evolutionary and neuro-biologic standpoint.
School Connectedness Matters
Despite all of the concerning data we see, there are also bright spots that point us in a direction to head. The CDC has published research showing that “surrounding youth with the proper support can reverse these trends and help our youth now and in the future.” (Steiner, 2019). The research findings highlight that a sense of being cared for, supported, and belonging at school — called “school connectedness” — has an important effect on students. In order to leverage school connectedness as a protective factor for well-being, we can:
Build healthy ecosystems in which adults are cared for and care for one another. Adults who feel unsupported, alone, and stressed can’t provide young people what they most need right now. As adults, we need to extend self-compassion and care to one another so that we have more reserve in the tank to show up for the young people in our care. We must take care of our own social and emotional well-being so that we can consistently show up and be the self-composed, regulated adults our young people need us to be. This will require building adult learning cultures that value and support the very same experiences young people need to thrive - safety, belonging, purpose, and agency.
Partner with young people to create collaborative, healing centered cultures. All young people and adults will benefit from creating what Dr. Shawn Ginwright, CEO of the Flourish Agenda calls a healing centered culture. This means remembering that the distress we see in our students is a function of the societal context they are living in. Rather than focusing on changing or fixing individual students, focus on creating the conditions we all need for well-being. Listen to and partner with young people, and especially young people who are part of marginalized groups, to honor their agency to co-create the conditions needed for their own well-being. Young people have much to teach us about creating identity safe, culturally sustaining, humanized spaces in which we can all heal, learn, and grow.
Understand and leverage neuroplasticity and organicity. We now know that the brain continues to remodel and create new neural pathways throughout our lifespan based on experience. Even when young people have experienced significant trauma, their brains will continue to heal and re-wire based on the quality of the relationships they experience. Just as we are hard-wired for survival, we also have a biological imperative to grow through connection. As a complex system, the mind is always moving in the direction of health. Our job as adults who care about young people is to guide, bolster, and support this natural unfolding and the surest way to do that is through intentional, sustained relationships.
Prioritize support for the creation of Developmental Relationships. Close connections with adults are critically important for young people, especially those growing up in marginalized communities where structural racism means higher levels of baseline stress and fewer resources. Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s research on The Power of Showing Up (Siegel and Bryson, 2020) confirms that the greatest predictor of child and adolescent well-being is secure attachment, meaning the existence of at least one reliable adult who ‘shows up’ for them and with whom a young person feels safe, seen, soothed and secure. However, the Search Institute conducted a survey of nearly 15,000 young people and 700 adults and found that while 83% of the adults surveyed reported being intentional about building developmental relationships with young people, only 46% of young people reported experiencing strong developmental relationships with adults.There is a gap between our good intentions and what young people are experiencing. In an effort to close this gap, teachers and staff in one NEP district have committed to knowing every student by name, need, strength, and story.
Search Institute, Developmental Relationships Framework
Recognize behavior as communication and prioritize co-regulation. Rather than expressing themselves in easy-to-understand ways, young people (and sometimes adults too) frequently show us that they are suffering in confusing, challenging, disruptive ways. Yet, it is the young people that frustrate us the most who most need us to stay connected and believe in them - even and especially on their worst days.
According to Maggie Kline, long-time school counselor and author of Brain-Changing Strategies to Trauma-Proof Our Schools: A Heart-Centered Movement for Wiring Well-Being, a trauma responsive school is one where “every staff member has emblazoned in mind and heart that behavior arises from a state of stress.” That is, how we perceive and interpret the world and how we respond to others is a function of our nervous system ‘state’: the extent to which we are experiencing a felt sense of safety. When we are within our window of tolerance, we are open for connection and clear thinking. If stress has tipped our nervous system into a survival state, we are more likely to see and experience danger and behave accordingly to protect ourselves This means that the most effective way to change behavior is not through punishment which often increases nervous system dysregulation (not to mention alienation and loneliness), but by helping young people regulate so that they have access to the logic and decision making parts of their brains.
Self-regulatory capacity develops in a process of creating positive moments of mutuality and co-regulation in the context of relationships. In school, this means that the students’ need for feeling seen is met, and that their emotions are recognized and acknowledged by adults who themselves are regulated even in the face of young people’s distress and challenging behavior. For example, one district in the NEP network sought funding and created Wellness Centers - safe, soothing, spaces in every school where young people can go to decompress, connect, and get support.Expand our notion of where teaching and learning happen to include the full ecosystem. Schools cannot do this work alone. Young people live in communities and engage in relationships and learning in and outside of school buildings. There are places and spaces in and around schools that provide critically important opportunities for culturally sustaining connection and contribution; we need to expand our notions of where and how learning happens and build meaningful partnerships with organizations throughout the ecosystems in which young people live to share responsibility and ensure that every young person is connected and cared for.
Our systems were not designed with whole person, equitable well-being in mind; as a result, prioritizing these aspects of school can often feel like an uphill battle and none of us can do this alone. Now is the time to expand the core purpose of school to prioritize well-being and invest in the creation of healthy, connected ecosystems for young people and adults to work, learn, and grow.