- Welcome to "Teen Talk".

I'm Rhonda Herb.

Adolescence is an important time for young people to get a healthy start in life.

The number of children reporting poor mental health issues, however, is increasing.

Building strong bonds and connecting to our youth can help protect their mental health.

Early treatment can help prevent more severe, lasting problems as a child grows up.

To more effectively recognize the signs, Valley PBS has developed "Teen Talk".

In partnership with local mental health experts and professionals, we're bringing the conversation directly to our school districts and our students.

"Teen Talk" gives our communities an opportunity to consider the importance of de-stigmatizing youth mental health issues, understanding the complexities of this topic and promoting dialogue with different schools will help you engage your own student bodies and foster meaningful conversations.

- [Announcer] Thank you to our "Teen Talk" sponsors.

Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, Ascend Behavioral Health, Balance Kids, Learn4Life High Schools, CalViva Health, and Kepler Neighborhood School.

- Teen suicide is a very serious and growing issue.

A decade ago, according to statistics provided by the CDC, approximately 16% of all high school students said that they had considered the problem of suicide.

But last year, that percentage had increased to 22%.

So what's going on with our teens today?

What very special issues are they facing?

We're here today with a great group of students at the Riverdale Wellness Center to talk directly to students about this very important topic.

My name is Rhonda Herb, this is "Teen Talk", and thank you so much for joining us today.

So I shared some statistics that I got from the CDC's website.

Can we start by talking about what we think might be driving the increase in suicide?

- It is a multi varied, very complex question and problem.

You know, there are many variables at play when we talk about people who are referred for suicide or suicide risk.

Some of those variables may include things like the willingness of individuals to be more open about it.

We've spent decades talking about being open to mental health challenges and struggles.

The impacts and the results of training more healthcare professionals to ask questions about suicidal ideation, more primary care physicians who are asking more questions.

A push in our healthcare system to do more primary prevention and to do more in terms of asking about mental health questions at physicals and annual checkups and things like that.

So in one way, maybe there's more conversation and more avenues for young people to open up about their struggles and that willingness or that openness and the availability of those things may allow them to be more open to that.

- Coraline, I wanna ask you.

You heard the numbers that I shared and that's self-reporting.

- Yeah.

- Does that sound accurate to you?

Would you say 22% today of high schoolers are facing this issue?

Sounds about right based on your practice?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, suicidality is, there's a spectrum.

There's a degree of it.

So there are plenty of people who have passive suicidal thoughts and then there are people who actually have attempts.

So it's a broad range.

So I think that 22% captures everything from the most severe to the least severe.

And you know, I would agree with the doctor that we're definitely asking more questions.

So there's probably more, sort of diagnosis of the problem because we're actually asking the question.

I also think there's more environmental stressors that are more immediate and in the face of our youth, and they used to be a little bit more removed.

So I think that's something that we need to address, you know, altogether as a society.

What are the stressors, how are they increasing, and how can we work on them together?

- Well, let's turn to our students.

We thank you for volunteering today and being here.

I don't know who'd like to start us out, but I'd be real interested in hearing from your perspective.

What do you think are the drivers?

Whether you're dealing with your friends, your fellow students, what do you think would be issues that would be most troubling to them?

Who'd like to start us?

Cristel?

- Yes.

I think one of the most things that's happening is because of social media.

When somebody posted something on social media, sometimes they don't think what are people gonna say.

And most of the time people get bullied because of what they post on social media.

It's not necessarily bad all the time, but people will put hate comments on the post.

Or, it could also be stuff going on at home.

- Okay.

So social media and home are issues for you.

Somebody else wanna add anything?

- You said for youth, right?

Yes, yeah.

- I wanna add on to what Cristel said.

I really agree and I think with social media and the internet nowadays, the internet is so vast.

Twitter, I know some of these social media apps don't have any filters at all.

So people post whatever they want and then with everyone seeing what's going on in the world, everyone's just so much more alert about what's going on in France, what's going on in China.

Like we know everything that's going on, and I feel that that awareness does eventually take a toll on somebody because to an extent you might be worried about something that's out of our control.

And being aware that the world isn't perfect and you're not always safe, especially with everything that goes on here in America with school shootings, that's like, it's on a rise.

And you know, it's always a question like, are we next?

So yeah, I do think social media drives a huge play into that.

- Yeah.

Does anyone have a personal example?

Whether your life or friends, colleagues that you know of somebody who's been hurt by a posting on social media?

- The only example I possibly have was from, it was like two years ago.

One of our valedictorians, her speech went kind of viral on Facebook for all the wrong reasons.

She was targeted by bigots and racists for all of the accomplishments that she achieved as a first generation student here in Riverdale.

People were displeased with that.

And it's upsetting to see that a town, especially where majority of it makes up of Hispanic folks, they were still targeted like that by bigots.

- So social media certainly plays a big role and cyber bullying, you've also mentioned.

You said something, Cristel, about home situations.

What might be troubling there for some of the people that you know?

- So some of the people I know is that some of their parents are split up and stuff and there's lots of tension there.

But there's also other stuff like, students seeing the parents fighting and stuff like that.

- What does school do to help students with these issues?

What resources are you aware of?

- Counselors.

Resources the school provides, such as, you know, closure, somewhere to go 'cause not necessarily like the home or social media is the right place to go.

'Cause you know, you say like you're down on something and you just come to school, it's something you go do every day.

Well that really.

- [Rhonda] So this wellness center is a resource for you?

- Correct.

- Has anybody you know ever taken advantage of it and use the resources here?

- What do you mean by taking advantage of it?

- Coming here to see a counselor speak to somebody?

- Yes.

- Yes.

Okay.

Wonderful.

And you think the students are well aware of it and know that they have - Yeah.

- access to this spot?

Okay.

Can we talk a few minutes, Dr. Christopherson, about what you think are risk factors for teens that might be things we could be aware of to help deal with the problem among the people that we know?

Potential risk factors?

- Yeah, so some of the risk factors that we look at when we're working with young people especially is gonna be a real dramatic change.

If you see a sudden change in grades, a sudden change in social groups, a sudden change in willingness to socialize, a sudden resistance to going to school or to participating in activities that typically they're involved in.

When young people maybe suddenly quit a sport or suddenly quit activity that they were involved in.

One of the big markers of, especially the depressive syndromes, is something we refer to as anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in things that you used to be involved in.

And so, whenever we see these dramatic shifts, that's a huge risk factor for, not necessarily that somebody has a mental illness or is struggling with a mental illness, but it's something that says, "Hey, pay attention."

- I've gone to a lot of youth symposiums, I've worked with a lot of teens who have suicidality and others as well, and they're asking for help.

They're asking for help in terms of filtering and regulation and limits.

And even if a teen doesn't directly ask their parent for that kinda help, this is something we owe our youth.

This is something that in previous generations was very different.

We helped regulate what they watched on TV when they watched it.

The schools regulate the curriculum and yet the internet and, which is now in their hand 24/7, is not regulated for them.

And so I really think as a society we can do better in helping filter that, in helping them not get such mass information constantly that's often negative.

Yeah.

- So, you students are representing Riverdale High School today.

You chose to be here.

Somebody reached out and asked what students would be interested in participating in this panel.

I would love to hear your reasons for volunteering today.

Why you thought this was an important topic and why you wanted to be here and share.

Can we start with you?

- Yeah.

I agreed to be in this because I really wanted to spread awareness to people about our situation and how some of us can't reach out to anyone for help.

I have a hard time asking for help and really wanna know, I wanna let people know that there's people out there who could help us.

- [Rhonda] Thank you.

- [Coraline] Yeah.

- Appreciate that.

- I volunteered and I agree to be here today because after COVID I know that, especially with social media and everything, I'm very involved with my community.

I love cleaning up the town.

I love being involved.

I love always going to football games.

I love volunteering for whatever's going on.

I love doing it all.

And I know that when I see people who are always involved, you know, seem to be doing good, they're happy in what they do.

I think to myself, I'm like.

"Damn.

Nothing could be wrong with their lives."

But I know that I wanna let people know that I struggle personally a lot.

Like a lot goes on behind the scenes.

And you know, someone can be extremely involved in something and put on this happy persona at school and stuff, but behind the scenes at home, like it's rough, you know?

And I wanna let people know that.

- [Rhonda] Thank you.

- Yeah.

- Well, adding on to what Elena said, I think being really involved and it's like students that are really academically proficient, who have straight A's, who are in sports, and it's sometimes those students who struggle the most because they're caring so much who are balancing sports and still maintaining a 4.0 GPA or honor roll.

And so I think personally, like I struggle with that.

Like, it's hard.

Academically I do good, but it's hard to do that.

I'm in several AP classes, and then so I agree to be here today because I wanna raise awareness for those students, who to others it may seem like they're okay, but it's okay to know that it's okay to not be okay and ask for help.

- Thank you.

Cristel?

- Why I agreed to do this 'cause like Angel said, I wanna spread awareness to mental health, especially coming from a Hispanic Latino household where mental health is not talked enough about or seen as a taboo.

- Yeah.

- Thank you.

- I agree to come on the show today because I feel like mental health is a very important aspect of our today's society.

And I feel like, you know, everybody suffers from depression from different reasons.

And some reason, you feel this way that I wanna let people know that they can talk about it.

Say, the reason is home or grades or school or somebody's just bringing you down.

I want people to know that it's okay to come out the hole and just talk about it and help yourself.

- Thank you.

Thank you everyone very much.

One of the interesting things I'm hearing is that we can't always tell from the outside who might be most susceptible, because we're hearing conversations here about students who are AP students, students who are graduating, students who are very successful and have excellent lives, and everybody else is looking at them and thinking, "They've got a perfect life.

What have they got to be depressed about?"

So how does that inform our understanding of suicidality and how to help people if it's not possible to have a prototype?

- Well, I think Dr. Christopherson was alluding to if you see behavioral change.

So regardless of whether someone is coming from a privileged environment or not, if you're seeing marked behavioral change, and as a parent, as someone who's close to a child, whatever role you might have, you need to follow that intuition.

If you have a sense that this person, there's a marked change, maybe in their expression, in how they're relating to other people, in their behavior either at school or somewhere else.

So it's not just in their performance, but also in how they're presenting and how they're taking care of themselves and how, again, their facial expression is and how engaged they are with their friends or not engaged.

And, going back to the internet and what we were talking about, how much time are they spending on the internet?

I think that's important too, because the biggest influencers used to be parents, educators, now we need to add in 24/7 unregulated internet is a huge influence.

So if you notice a big change, also start looking at how much time is being spent on a screen and how is that maybe correlated with someone's mood.

And if you notice that the mood drops or is irritable or angry or anxious after a lot of screen time, then that's a big marker that someone needs to step in and help.

- So you all heard Coraline talk about this, and being aware of screen time and how students are using it.

What are your reactions to that?

Does anybody have the experience of having limitations based on your use of the internet and social media?

And how do you feel about that?

Anybody?

- I'll agree to that.

I know that during quarantine I was miserable.

'Cause I was, you know, I was always on the screen.

I was either looking at the computer screen on Zoom, listening to my teachers just going on and on about, 'cause it wasn't really interactive.

It was just on a screen.

I, oh my God, I never wanna do online learning again.

It sucks.

And then also when I spend hours on hours on TikTok just scrolling and scrolling, I feel horrible.

Like I go to sleep and I'm all, ugh.

I don't like.

Then I just feel this sense of dread and emptiness at the end of the night.

And no, I love to be productive.

I love to go out and play with my little brothers and do homework and do stuff that I know like, "Okay, now I've accomplished this."

And I go to bed, it's so much more easier to fall asleep when I have days like that than when I spend all day staring at my screen.

- I think all of us had to rely heavily on technology during COVID.

I know personally it was like the only way to feel connected with others, like through social media or FaceTime or messaging friends and stuff.

So it was really hard when we came back from COVID coming back to school to personally interact with someone face-to-face.

And so now it's gone really hard to let go over technology and cell phones and social media.

Like even for myself, I'll check my screen time sometimes, and it's hours on there.

And it's hours that they could have been invested more productively.

- Interesting.

Thank you.

- I know what Elena said and what Coraline said that after you watch so much TikTok, especially during the pandemic, you see bad news upon bad news upon bad news.

I feel like that takes a big toll on you emotionally and it makes you feel like, "Oh my gosh.

The world is probably gonna end," or have all those thoughts more than usual.

- Angel, you said earlier that it's hard to ask for help.

- Yeah.

- [Rhonda] Yeah.

Could you say a little more about that?

Why do you think it's so hard?

- Well, it's kinda hard for me 'cause ever since I was young I mostly did things for myself and I didn't really have anyone to look up to or ask for help and just.

(exhales deeply) Sorry.

(chuckles) - I think there's more stigma from family or generational stigma.

Coming from a Hispanic household, I know my parents probably know nothing about mental health and whatever they know about mental health is what I share with them.

So I think it's hard for us to ask our parents for help who are supposed to be trusted adults if they don't even know about it.

How can I ask them about mental health if they don't know anything about mental health.

- [Coraline] Yeah.

- I could add on to Marleen's thing, how getting mental health help in a Hispanic household is hard because in our culture mental health is not seen as a thing.

For example, I have always had intrusive thoughts, but I never knew where it was because I didn't learn about mental health until I got older.

Once I saw, I was like, I felt like I was going crazy, especially in the pandemic.

Reaching out for help was hard 'cause I was like, "Oh my gosh, nobody knows about this."

When I told my parents, "Oh you know, I have this," they're like, "How?

You're just a kid.

You have nothing to be anxious about."

Now I talked about it more, they don't necessarily understand what it is, but they help me with it.

They help me get help.

- We've talked about the challenges of social media.

I'm curious if anyone can see positive to social media as a means of reaching out and connecting.

Even though it can certainly have limitations and have a downside, have you seen opportunities where somebody reaching out on social media was helpful to you or made you feel included, made you feel liked, and just made that connection?

Have you seen that opportunity used?

- I would say so, especially over quarantine.

The talk about mental health 'cause I know I also, like when freshman year and sophomore year, I was all, "Oh, I'm not gonna go to the counselor.

That's embarrassing.

That's not me."

'Cause especially in my household, my immigrant parents, you know, they're very independent and they're like, "Oh, we never asked for help."

And so that kinda ideal, ideolation, is that how you say it?

I don't know, but that kinda form of thinking was kinda onto me.

Like, "Oh, I mean, they did it alone so why can't I?"

And so especially on social media, like seeing everybody like, "Oh, I'm going through it."

And they'd post their struggles and I'm like, "Oh, I went through that too."

Like, "Oh, I'm not alone and it's okay to reach out and it's okay to not be okay."

- Are there any common myths, misperceptions about this topic that you think people should be aware of?

- Yeah, I think there's a lot of 'em, but the one that I really wanna mention is the fear that a lot of people have.

If I mention suicide, if I talk about mental health, then that person might actually complete suicide.

That person might actually do it.

I don't wanna bring it up.

It might insert the thought into their head and they might do something.

But in fact, the reverse is true.

If you open up the conversation, it opens up the possibility for the person to consider other options, for the person to create a safety plan, to create a contingency plan if those thoughts become impulses.

Thoughts are not what's so harmful, It's if it becomes an action.

So those are very separate.

So asking about suicide, asking about mental health does not make it worse.

Actually talking about it helps the person consider other perspectives.

- Thank you.

Okay, then we're gonna wrap up and I'm gonna ask as a final question, final piece of advice for everyone here.

Whether you are a teen or an adult, if you are aware of people who are struggling with this topic, what final advice do you have for all of us to help them through these times?

What would you say, Dr. Christopherson?

- The advice that I would give is, on the one hand for those who are in a crisis.

Whether they're struggling with significant mental illness, if they're struggling with suicidal thoughts or the impulses to self-harm, there is a suicide hotline number.

If you hit 988 on a telephone, then that will route you to the local county suicide hotline.

And if you are a friend or a loved one of somebody who's struggling with those kinds of things, if you're a young person, definitely get an adult involved.

You don't want to handle that issue on your own.

And this is a big problem.

It requires lots of problem solving and it requires a lot of ability to deal with the emotional and the fear associated with that, while also trying to help people.

Being a young person and there's too many things that you're struggling with and your brain is not quite developed enough to take on this big of a problem.

So when you have friends or loved ones, get somebody involved.

Get a parent, a loved one.

If there's any kinda crisis, if somebody's in crisis, if there's a risk of any kind of imminent danger, 911 and the police department is who you're gonna call.

You're gonna call for emergency services.

And one thing that I want parents to understand is that it's okay to take our child to the hospital.

It's better that they be in an environment where they're gonna be prevented from being able to harm themselves.

And then we'll be able to have the time to get the treatment.

If a young person needs to go to the hospital, if they need to go to the hospital for a couple of days, for a couple of weeks, then that's better because it gives us time to work on the issues.

It gives us time to assess, you know, is there a medication that might be helpful?

Is there a therapeutic intervention?

Do we need intensive therapy, weekly therapy?

This gives us time.

Also, suicide tends to be very impulsive action.

And so if we can get somebody into a safe environment, like a hospital, like calling 911 and having them transported to an ER, then that allows that impulse to kinda die down.

There's a lot of spontaneous remission in suicidality.

If you can prevent somebody from acting on it, it kinda naturally dies down and they do recognize, "Okay, I did need help."

And in fact, a lot of the data reflects that those who make a suicide attempt and survive do actually have a reduced risk of suicide in the future.

- Anything you wanna add to that?

- Yeah, I think just going back to the, ending on a positive note, the reason I'm in this field, in the mental health field, we're talking about emotional disorders.

And the brain is the most malleable organ.

It's constantly changing with the neurochemicals, with the influences from the environment, from our relationships.

There is so much possibility with the brain, and this is all temporary.

Our emotions are temporary.

They're constantly changing.

So, there's so much possibility for change.

And as young people, your brains are so full of potential.

And I think for me, it's just, of all of our organs, of all of our systems in our body, our brain and our nervous system has the most opportunity for change.

And so, you know, all the possibilities are there.

And I think the last thing I'd wanna say is there is also this myth that mental health disorders are permanent.

And I'm always trying to debunk that because how can something be permanent if your brain is constantly changing according to your relationships, according to your environment?

So I really try to educate people that mental health and emotional disorders do not need to be permanent conditions.

Your brain is constantly being influenced and can be influenced for good.

- Thank you.

Thank you all of you guys for showing up today and helping out and having this very important conversation.

You were brave and you were honest and you contributed a lot.

We appreciate you very much.

We thank you for watching today's "Teen Talk".

I hope the information was useful and that you can put it to some good use with the people that you know.

Thank you.

(uplifting music) - [Announcer] For more information and resources, visit our website at ValleyPBS.org/TeenTalk.

(uplifting music) Thank you to our "Teen Talk" sponsors.

Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, Ascend Behavioral Health, Balance Kids, Learn4Life High Schools, CalViva Health, and Kepler Neighborhood School.