Why is Mental Health Ignored in Schools?

by with 3 Comments FeaturedGen Z

Everyone remembers the Parkland, Florida shooting that occurred in February 2018, taking the lives of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just recently news has come out that two MSDHS students have committed suicide. I personally found out about this news on Twitter, where people took to tweeting about mental health, particularly PTSD in this case. 

I believe that schools do not do an adequate job of addressing and working with mental health issues. At my own university, there is always a waitlist, sometimes a month-long to see a therapist on campus. My school does provide counseling services for free on campus, which is amazing, but they are severely understaffed. As college students, many of us cannot afford to go to therapy regularly. My school has good intentions with the free counseling program, but overall they need to expand their efforts. A student should not face a month-long waitlist when they choose to seek help.

Thinking back to my high school experience, I cannot remember a single mention of mental health outside of learning about different disorders in psychology class. I’m not quite sure why high schools don’t generally address the topic of mental health, but I believe this is a huge mistake. High school environments are home to bullying, stress, and expectations that all take a huge toll on students’ mental health. I thoroughly believe that high schools should not only be educating students about mental health, but also offering more services for help.

The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survived an extremely tragic event that will undoubtedly stay with them and shape their lives forever. It is highly likely that many of the students at MSDHS have or will develop PTSD due to this experience. Especially after a tragic event, schools should address mental health and work with the students to work through grief or trauma. MSDHS already lost 17 students to gun violence, and it is horrible that they are losing even more to suicide.

Various news articles say that students of MSDHS were feeling what is known as “survivor’s guilt”, ultimately leading to suicide. After such a traumatic event as the mass shooting, MSDHS should have been much more focused on mental health for both the students and the rest of the community surrounding the school. Tweets from MSDHS students revealed as early as a week after the shooting, students were expected to return back to normal school life as if nothing had happened.

News has also recently come out that a parent of one of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting has also committed suicide. We all know the deadly effects of gun violence, but it seems that the lasting mental effects afterwards are not addressed or sufficiently treated. Although losing a child or a friend is not something a person can easily get over, the mental health effects can be handled better if we just addressed them. Those who survive shooting situations should, without a doubt, be provided with adequate mental health care. No one can effectively walk away from such a situation and be completely fine. Mental health concerns should be taken far more seriously if we want to stop these tragic suicides.

This article was originally published on 15 February 2019.

Similar Read: The Veiled Epidemic of Suicide

A Notification of Death

by with 2 Comments CultureFeatured

[This is part one of a three-part series on American gun violence.]

The screen on my phone illuminates with a notification. My eyes peer over to read the information and then I return to whatever activity I was performing. As I write this piece, I received notifications from The New York Times and ESPN. While this may seem to be mundane behavior in the 21st century; it’s not. It’s not mundane because often the words in the notifications inform me of death and my reaction to that information over time alarms me. Whether it’s a headline of another LeBron James stat line or a notification that seventeen have been gunned down in yet another mass shooting, I typically peer away and go about my business – I’m desensitized and that’s a major problem.

April 1999 was the spring before I was to enter high school and I remember, quite vividly, learning about the Columbine High School shooting from the evening news that night. I wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone then but I knew from the murmurings of the adults in the street on my way home that something bad had happened. I was in the eighth grade and I quietly wondered if I would have to fear for my safety in high school. However, at the time, it seemed like such a one-off incident and growing up in Brooklyn – Colorado could have been on Pluto for all I knew. So the initial fear subsided and I recall the outrage from adults which lead to discussions around the shooters music of choice, bullying, the shooters parental upbringing, but never a referendum on guns. 15 dead in an American High School.

It was my first day of work as a full-time working professional, ever, on April 16, 2007. I was living at home at the time and was so excited to share with my family all of the details of my first day of work at American Express. I wasn’t given a laptop that day so I wasn’t as connected to what was happening in the world for most of the day. However, I do remember people around the office murmuring about a school shooting at Virginia Tech. Focused on making a good first impression, the school shooting didn’t register until I retired to my room later that evening where I learned of the scale of what had taken place. Gun control again lead the national debate for a time but then faded into the background. 33 dead in an American University.

I was living in Sydney, Australia at the time of the Sandy Hook shootings in December 2012. I remember having to play the role of American Ambassador in providing answers to my perplexed Aussie friends who simply could not understand why mass shootings continue to occur in the States. It was in hearing myself answer their questions aloud that I realized how nonsensical it is to not have sensible gun control laws in place. Even as I explained the full context of the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment I was still unable to make sense of this American problem. On my first night back in America, I saw my friends giving a television interview on CNN; their daughter had been in one of the Sandy Hook classrooms. Miraculously, she was physically unharmed but many of her fellow students did not suffer the same fate. For many reasons, that shooting was the most traumatic for me personally. I believe in the sanctity of the joys of the childhood experience and I couldn’t sleep for many nights as I came to the belief that the frequency of gun deaths in one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in history had to be intentional. 28 dead in an American Elementary School.

Fast forward to the Parkland shooting last month and shockingly there were no murmurings in the street this time. Many people, myself included, received the notification on their phone and went about their day after learning that seventeen teenagers were gunned down in their high school. In the days that followed the remaining students, whose lives will never be the same, rose to the national spotlight with a defiant message to the nation: #NeverAgain. The politicians and the corporations that own them all responded with an all too familiar bluster around what actions they would take to change what has become status quo. 17 dead in an American High School… again. 

As much as we don’t want to admit it, this is who America is: A rabidly violent nation whose love affair with guns will cease at nothing or no one; not even elementary school children. It is, in fact, the “Wild Wild West” that the rest of the world portrays us to be because we allow this to happen time and time again. Sadly, while I praise the fervor of the Parkland students, and the Sandy Hook students before them, and the Virginia Tech students before them, and the Columbine students before them; I believe that they too will ultimately add their voices to a large chorus of people that want sensible gun control but will never see it. I hope I am wrong but #NeverAgain may just be yet another hashtag thrown in a mountainous heap of social justice hashtags that never sees any legitimate federal action. More dead in an American… doesn’t really matter now, we’re desensitized anyway.

Part Two: MLK 50 Forward: Bankrupt Justice