Colorado’s Young People are Screaming for Help. It is Time to Stop Ignoring Them.

Colorado’s Young People are Screaming for Help. It is Time to Stop Ignoring Them.

Elizabeth Boland

Colorado’s pediatric mental health professionals are struggling to stay afloat amidst a tsunami of desperate need. On May 25th, 2021, Children’s Hospital of Colorado declared a state of emergency. Over two years, they experienced a 90% increase in demand for pediatric mental health services (1). Children’s Hospital Colorado and many other medical institutions across the state have been overwhelmed by children in desperate need of mental health care. Emergency rooms are flooded with pediatric patients who have attempted suicide. In fact, suicide is now the leading cause of death for Colorado children aged 10 and older (2).

Youth mental health crises have deep reverberations across society. Suicide contagion is a well-documented phenomenon - the suicide of one person can lead to others within that community, school, or peer group also taking their own lives (3). Suicide contagion causes despair to spread through a community in a manner like an infectious disease. For example, between 2013 and 2015, 29 children in El Paso County alone committed suicide (4). At one point, 5 students in a single Colorado Springs high school committed suicide in a semester long period (4). The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated Colorado’s existing youth suicide crisis.

The current mental health crisis is apparent to anyone working in Colorado’s classrooms. Schools across the state are seeing higher rates of behavioral problems. Children are getting into more frequent physical altercations in the classroom, and teachers have reported elementary school students attempting to stab each other during class.(5) These behavioral problems are taking an enormous toll on teachers and students. In January of 2022, according to the National Education Association, 55% of teachers reported that they were preparing to leave education (6). The increase in behavioral problems in schools is certainly likely to be a contributing factor. If action is not taken to address the current crises, children, teachers, and the educational system will be at risk.

There are several immediate actions that we can and must take to improve our current situation. First, we must make a statewide effort to increase the pediatric mental health workforce. The government can provide schools with grants to hire mental and behavioral health professionals. This will be especially needed for schools in rural or otherwise medically under-served communities. Additionally, government can work to increase the quality of broadband services in rural and medically under-served communities. Mental and behavioral health is often delivered very successfully through telehealth, so better broadband access translates to better healthcare access. At the same time, Colorado must prioritize the training and retention of the next generation of mental health professionals, including providers, counselors, and therapists. In addition to increasing the accessibility of mental health services, action can be taken in schools. Topics like resiliency and mental health can be built into curriculum. Administrators can be better trained on how to support teachers in the classroom as they deal with behavioral issues. These changes can help improve the mental health of not just students, but also teachers and other school staff who are overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis they are being forced to shoulder.

However, the effort to improve youth mental health cannot and should not fall solely on the backs of educators. Policy makers and public health officials can begin to bring back structure and major life markers that students have lost throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic policy must find the balance between preventing COVID spread and bringing normalcy back to kids’ lives. Many pandemic policies have deprived students of access to friends, activities, athletics, and routines that act as valuable mental health supports during development. Mental health professionals have cited the loss of structures and routines as contributing to the current crisis. Returning students to as much normalcy as possible is a broad, immediate mental health solution. Now that more is known about COVID prevention, transmission, and treatment, public health officials must use the data to take action to address both the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic of despair currently spreading across the state.