JoCo Teen Council Meeting Recap September, 2024
For our second teen council meeting of the 2024-2025 school year, our Teen Council members started off by reflecting on Zero Reasons Why’s Three Pillars:
- Build community support
- Remove the stigma
- Commit to education
We then reviewed Mental Health America’s State Report that was released in July. Here’s a summary of what we learned:
- In their 2023 report, Mental Health America ranked the state of Kansas at #51 (out of 51. 50 states + Washington D.C.) in terms of low access to mental health care and high rates of reported mental illness. In 2024, Mental Health America ranked Kansas at #22 out of 51, which is a huge improvement!
- Many believe that the improvement can be linked to the Senate Substitute for House Bill 2208 signed by Governor Laura Kelly, which established a new model for providing behavioral health services in Kansas— the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.
- We learned about the benefits of the CCBHC model and how it has increased access to mental healthcare in the state of Kansas.
After reviewing the report, we broke out into a storytelling icebreaker. Teens were sorted into pairs to interview each other with the following questions:
- Prompt #1: Why are you passionate about mental health and suicide prevention?
- Prompt #2: What stigmas have you heard surrounding mental health? Why is it important to remove the stigma?
- Prompt #3: What do you think schools or communities can do to better support teen mental health?
- Prompt #4: What advice or encouragement would you give to someone who might be struggling?
After the interviews, we shared our answers to the group. Some things we talked about the most were:
- Flippant attitudes about mental illness and suicide.
- Apparent over-reaction from adults when they hear that a teen is struggling.
- The fact that mental health is often not “seen” like physical health, and thus people dismiss it.
We followed this time with a brief discussion about ways we could work to remove those and other stigmas in our schools.
One possible way we discussed addressing these stigmas and generally spreading awareness of the campaign was to host assemblies at our schools. While we have not hosted school assemblies before, there was agreement in the room that assemblies could be an effective way to promote the campaign and the resources available to teen in the community and within their own schools.
We ended our time together discussing our upcoming October 10 community forum, where we will address the topic of technology and its multi-faceted affects on teen mental health. We discussed how we want the forum questions and our round table discussions at the forum to focus on the positive impacts of technology on mental health more than the negative affects, which are fairly well-known to many of us and are discussed more often. For our roundtable discussions, we came up with the idea that each table compile a list of social media accounts that provide helpful mental health and suicide prevention resources and share positive messaging that will help combat the negativity often experienced online.