Caring for the Whole Person
Mental health has been the issue focus of the Youth Action Internship team over the last two academic years. Each year, the interns conduct a listening campaign with their peers to discern an issue to work on based on their lived experience and what they hear emerging from their peers. The struggle with mental health has been a central theme of each listening campaign. As a result of what the students witnessed last year, in May 2024 they submitted a proposal to the Archdiocese of Seattle Office for Catholic Schools on how to promote positive and flourishing mental health among Catholic high school students. What follows is an abridged excerpt from that report.
Student Experience Listening Campaign Findings:
In October 2023, we began one-to-one listening campaign. Over six weeks, students hosted 48 one-to-one sessions. The two most prevalent issues discussed were: racism and ableism/ access to healthcare, specifically within the education system.
• 33 percent of the one-to-one participants who were impacted by racism, ableism, or both expressed additional concerns about experiences of poor mental health or mental illness, stigma within their school or cultural context, and lack of access to mental health resources.
• When surveyed, 100 percent of our cohort named mental health as a social justice issue that aligned with their values and/or experiences.
“100 percent of our cohort named mental health as a social justice issue.”
Due to the resonance of this issue with us, we determined our social justice movement would focus on mental health, specifically among Generation Z. This work built upon the work from 2022-2023 with three major recurring themes:
1. The prioritization of success, performance and college entrance over the health and well-being of students.
2. A lack of parental support in taking action to engage in positive preventative mental health practices and receiving mental health resources from school or outside sources. Students believe that parents carry stigma about mental health that makes it impossible for them to express their needs or concerns to their parents.
3. Lack of social emotional and coping skills among students. It was described that while social isolation was a main contributor to poor mental health, many students did not know how to engage in relationship dynamics that could dismantle this sense of isolation.
We determined that building a mental health campaign to address feelings of isolation, parental mental health education, and teaching positive mental health practices would best address high schooler concerns.
Person in Catholic Schools
Catholic Social Teaching and Mental Health
Catholic social teaching calls us to honor the life and dignity of all people. For too long, many have believed that poor mental health and/or mental illness are symptomatic of individual failings to make the right choices to care for oneself or a signifier of inherent dysfunction within a human person. Mental health issues are not an individual problem but are an expression of collective failings to create a culture in which all people’s wellbeing and ability to thrive is valued above capitalist ideals and objectives. To promote the flourishing life and dignity for all people, we must engage in new ways of being.
An examination of our mental health shows that our capacity to be social and live as full and active members of their community are inhibited. As an act of forming our beloved community, it is now the responsibility of educators, parents, and the broader adult community to participate in reforming Catholic schools to ensure the holistic development of current and future generations of youth.
The mental health crisis is violating our ability to experience life as beloved individuals who are part of a harmonious and thriving human family. Now is the time to act in solidarity with youth to prevent the furthering of an epidemic and the perpetuation of intergenerational trauma.
At its root, mental health problems are linked to systems of capitalism, which value performance, production, and profit over protecting the well-being of the human person.
Additionally, capitalistic structures tend to use a one-size fits all approach to caring for individuals, which often fails to affirm nuances of experience and identity-based needs. Rather than recognizing this failure as systemic, capitalism over-emphasizes individual responsibility and casts out those who cannot meet its expectations. In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis explains the greatest threat to the environment is capitalism’s obsession with progress and profit. Francis evaluates that care for creation requires slowness, observation, and emphasis on interdependence.
Showing students care through the proposed solutions below will teach us a new way of being that not only honors ourselves and our community but will create leaders who are primed to care for our common home.
Possible Solutions
1. Near-to-Peer Support Programs
In a near-to-peer support model, the “specialist” is often two to five years older, shares a similar identity to the individual or group members such as sex or race, and have navigated similar challenges to the peer and/or have obtained a specialization such as a degree that allows them to accompany the peer while they work towards recovery. The near-to-peer structure functions less on mutual accountability and more on mentorship.
Developing a support structure of this kind in Seattle Catholic schools would be mutually beneficial for the self-interest of the peer participants, the peer specialist, and the archdiocese. For the participants, near-to-peer support minimizes experiences of social isolations through building social connection, dialogue, and skills. This would help equip students with relationship building and coping mechanisms for diverse challenges leading to greater feelings of belonging and fostering solidarity within affinity groups. For graduate students in LMFT programs, near-to-peer support offers the opportunity to practice group therapy techniques and complete clinical hours for their degree requirements and state licensure.
2. Parental Support Programs
Stigma around mental health being entrenched in the school culture, lack of awareness of available mental health resources, lack of mental health resources that connect with our various identities, intergenerational poverty, and lack of parental support/consent are the most signficant barriers for students. Therefore, getting parents involved, educated, and aware of their students’ mental health circumstances is crucial in alleviating the barriers that they admit to experiencing. One way to aid in this process is by the schools hosting Parent Mental Health Orientation sessions (PMHO). These sessions would initially be held during new student orientation at the beginning of each school year and continue throughout the year. These sessions would be designed to be educational launchpads to help parents become more knowledgeable and more actively involved in caring for the mental health of their children when appropriate and needed.
One of the biggest hurdles to consistent parental support and involvement in the arena of mental health for students is the presence of stigma. This stigma may be personal to the individual parent based on experience or it may be present because of cultural beliefs and ideas around mental health overall. Therefore, parental involvement in mental health cannot be taken with a one-size fits all approach but must account for the diverse cultural ideals and beliefs that parents come in with.
3. Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum
We found that high school students in Catholic schools struggled with stigma surrounding mental health, lack of belonging, burnout, lack of healthy coping mechanisms, and other prevalent negative effects.
To address burnout and other consequences of poor mental health care, we believe that a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum should be implemented within Seattle Catholic high schools. SEL is designed to impact the development of people by giving them the skills they need to create deeper and more meaningful relationships with themselves, their peers, and their communitie.
Students who have participated in SEL programming have experienced significant boosts in academic performance. Aside from academic performance, SEL empowers students with skills like perspective taking, emotional regulation, and increased stress management; skills that will benefit them far beyond high school.
Future Work of the Youth Action Team
This year the Youth Action Team interns have decided to focus on immigration as the issue to build their social movement towards. The second-year fellows are in the midst of building a Catholic High School Leaders for Social Change coalition made up of students attending Catholic schools and Catholic identifying high school students from across western Washington. The first phase of this work will focus on listening across the community and then discerning two to three issue areas for the coalition to focus on long-term. Based on our method and belief, we can’t know what those issues are until we hear from students, but based on the based on the historical experience of the Youth Action Team, we anticipate the work will connect to mental health challenges.
This article is an abridged version of a report the Youth Action Team put together and presented to the Archdiocesan School District. The students met with the superintendant of Catholic schools, Nicholas Ford, to present these findings and solutions. Nicholas was generous with his time and attention, sharing a meal with the students, allowing the students to share all of their work, and dialoguing with them about what might be possible. There has not been a formal follow up since the last meeting, but Nicholas asked the students to identify the solution that was highest priority and committed to exploring its implementation across Catholic schools in the archdiocese.
