If we are ever to confront mental illness appropriately -- to not fear it but rather respond as we would to a heart condition or diabetes -- our young people must be empowered with the skills to lead the way.
You only need to read one statistic to know why: 50% of all mental illness begins by age 14 and 75% starts by age 24.
The solution starts with teaching this generation that it’s OK to ask for help.
Those simple words power the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas' partnership with the Okay to Say campaign. Their year of work to demystify mental illness has sparked actions that sound modest but are potentially lifesaving, especially in the midst of this interminable, anxiety-producing pandemic:
Local middle-schoolers stand up for one another against campus bullying. High school teens write cards of support to anxious classmates. Others push loved ones into candid conversations about family members' mental illness.
Even kindergarteners are part of this growing movement as oversized emoji props help them sort through their emotions.
Already, about 2,000 Girl Scouts have completed the requirements to attain the “Okay to Say” patch, created by its Northeast Texas branch and now going statewide.
“When you hear about these girls engaging and holding each other accountable to talk about their emotions, you know it is having an impact,” Jennifer Bartkowski, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas, told me.
All Girl Scouts can earn the mental health patch through age-appropriate activities that include book reviews, artistic expression, peer-to-peer help and social media campaigns. Also in the requirements are stress management skills and a mental health safety plan for the entire family.
Because the program is free and its tools, resources and reading lists are available through Okay to Say, any family -- whether in Scouting or not, whether raising girls or boys -- can participate on its own.
As depression and anxiety grow -- and deaths by suicide continue to rise -- among teens and adolescents, giving young people knowledge about brain chemistry and emotions can help them know when they need to seek help.
Those skills also provide a large helping of empathy that may be a difference-maker for another person.
Getting those messages out is the mission of Okay to Say, the public awareness crusade launched by the Dallas-based Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute five years ago.
“It’s OK to talk about it [mental health issues] and you need to talk about it,” Shelby Abeyta, Okay to Say’s campaign director, said. “Just like with cancer or heart conditions, early recognition and early treatment lead to better outcomes.”
Abeyta shared several 2019 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control that speak specifically to girls' concerns:
-- Of the 37% of students who said they felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks that they stopped doing some usual activities, almost twice as many of those responses came from girls than boys.
-- Of the 16% of students reporting they had been bullied through texts or social media in the past year, the number again was almost twice as high for girls than boys.
-- Of the 19% who reported seriously considering suicide during the previous year, girls outnumbered boys two to one. However, while girls are more likely to contemplate the topic, boys are more likely to die by suicide.
Long before we ever heard the word coronavirus, Bartkowski saw a mental health crisis coming among her Scouts. Her camp counselors and troop leaders began several years ago to report a trend of harmful cutting, talk about suicide and stories of deep anxiety, stress and bullying.
As a stopgap, Bartkowski added mental health programming into summer camps while she worked with local leaders to create a robust soup-to-nuts initiative. The Okay to Say patch, introduced late last year, was imagined as step one.
Then the pandemic set in and the Girl Scouts went full tilt to push as many resources as possible into the patch work.
“Our girls all feel socially isolated and anxious because they are all living lives that are so different than what life was before,” Bartkowski said.
The Girl Scouts' most recent mental health work also addressed this year’s racial injustices. “After the murder of George Floyd, our Black and African-American families were in severe stress and anxiety,” Barkowski said, so the Scouts brought in their mental health partners to speak specifically to those concerns.
Bartkowski wants Girl Scouts to be a safe place for the youngest North Texans to have vulnerable conversations, whether that’s kindergarten Daisies getting their first lessons on what makes up emotions or high school Seniors and Ambassadors talking about the signs and dangers of suicidal ideation.
Plano troop leader Kyla Johnson told me that even for young Brownies, the Okay to Say curriculum cut to the heart of the challenges girls are feeling right now.
Her troop, which is made up of 11 third-graders, worked together to earn the patch during Zoom meetings. In one of the exercises, the girls used large emoji cutouts to help them articulate their feelings.
The 8- and 9-year-olds also talked about how to pay attention to other people’s emotions through their body language.
Most important, Johnson said, was the message that “if you really aren’t fine, you need to be able to share what’s the matter rather than hiding those feelings and rather making someone have to figure it out.”
Ashleigh Lee, who has led a troop of eight McKinney, Prosper and Frisco girls for eight years, said she used the Okay to Say patch work to spark a conversation that she believes otherwise would not have occurred.
“It allows the girls to be vulnerable with each other and let them know that they aren’t alone about their feelings,” Lee said. “Our girls need this kind of thing now more than ever.”
Lee’s seventh-grade Cadettes met their requirements during their first in-person meeting in September – outdoors and socially distancing. “These girls hadn’t seen each other in person since COVID lockdown began at spring break,” she said. “We knew that a lot of them were struggling and lonely.”
As the pre-teens worked through various exercises, they began a dialogue that was more intense, and sometimes raw, than even Lee and her co-leaders had expected.
“Kids these days are growing up in a world where things are harder … and to hear them open up about their feelings and struggles they are having and have their peers empathize with them about that stuff was really powerful,” Lee said.
The curriculum also moved them to talk about the coping skills they could use in response to being bullied, alone, scared or other low places.
“We’ve got some girls who have encountered some pretty incredible life-changing things during COVID,” Lee said. Hearing the girls talk openly about those realities and their willingness to get help convinced Lee that the patch work hit the mark.
Lee said her Frisco-based troop has now completed the requirements to receive its Okay to Say patches. But she was quick to add, “that was just a building block. The conversation is not over.”
