Addressing the Youth Mental Health Crisis Through Connection

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Thomas Bailey:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good. I'm Tom Bailey, president of Teachers College. This podcast is part of our public good initiative, which is a commitment that TC's researchers, scholars, and students will collaborate across disciplines and communities to confront the most pressing issues of our time in education, health, and psychology. Today, we turn to one of those issues that is impossible to ignore, youth mental health. Rates of anxiety, depression, and crisis amongst children and adolescents have reached alarming levels. And oftentimes, we are intervening once a child is already in crisis rather than identifying ways to prevent struggles from the outset. Joining me are two extraordinary guests, Dr. Claudia Fernandes, Vice President of Research and Evaluation at Born This Way Foundation, where she leads youth-centered research and programs that have reached young people across the globe. Might I add, she's a proud TC alumni. Welcome, Claudia.

Claudia Fernandes:
Thank you so much for having me here, Tom. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thomas Bailey:
Also joining us today is Dr. Mel Collier-Meek, my colleague here at Teachers College, whose work is helping bridge the gap between what young people need and what our schools and communities are actually equipped to deliver. Welcome.

Mel Collier-Meek:
Thanks so much for having me. Excited to talk to you both.

Thomas Bailey:
All right, so let's jump right in. Now to both of you, we're hearing the phrase youth mental health crisis everywhere right now. From your vantage point, what does that crisis actually look like on the ground for young people today? So Mel, why don't you start out with that question?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Sure. So in schools where I primarily work, it can look like an increased prevalence and intensity of behavioral health challenges. And while sometimes it looks how we typically think about mental health as increased depression or anxiety, it also can look like an increase in absenteeism or disruptive behavior in the classroom or decrease in academic engagement or even graduation rates. So it doesn't look how we typically expect mental health to look. It's that disengagement or increased challenge and need.

Thomas Bailey:
Okay. Claudia?

Claudia Fernandes:
Yeah. What we're seeing today, I often see it as a crisis of connection. As you shared, young people are navigating increased levels of anxiety, depression, striving for perfection, obviously an increase of loneliness, all of that, and in a world that is increasingly feeling also uncertain. So there is a lot going on today. And what is most challenging is that this crisis of connection, there can feel like there is a lack of support from trusted adults, from peers, and feeling like there isn't a place to go to just feel safe and supported, especially in person. I've spent over two decades inside schools as a teacher, a former bilingual school counselor in New York City. Shout out to New York City Public Schools. And also now today as a researcher and a behavioral scientist and a licensed professional counselor, and increasingly what I'm seeing is that we need to really think about and focus on how to prevent escalation, how to prevent, as Mel mentioned, the disengagement.
Because when we talk about the youth mental health crisis, it's like the symptoms are just exacerbating and we need to really think about, well, what are the things that work and always work? And we know that a trusted adult and a safe community are those pieces.

Thomas Bailey:
Okay. So, Mel, I know you think about the parents or teachers. From your perspective, what are you seeing as this growing mental health issues for the adults that are engaged here as opposed to just the students themselves?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Absolutely. And people are struggling, and it's like a continuation of challenges that have existed for decades. In just 2024, there was a US Surgeon General's report on parent wellbeing that followed actually a youth wellbeing report. So parents are struggling themselves and trying to figure out how they can take care of themselves, how we figure out how systemically as a society we're there for families, especially during challenging times, politically in underserved communities with less resources available is really important for us and an area for our work. And I think when we think about being there for the adults, that's an important way that we can be there for youth who are struggling. So if we want to think from a prevention lens, supporting the wellbeing of the adults has a ripple effect on the youth that they support. And so there's a lot that we can do to better support teachers so that they can navigate this crisis both for themselves and the students I work with.

Thomas Bailey:
Okay. Well, speaking about what we can do, why don't you tell us about the youth mental health collaboratives that you're building here at Teachers College? What is it? Who is it bringing together and what is the driving vision behind it?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Absolutely. I feel really lucky to be at a university where we are working across silos. We know that these crises that youth, schools, communities are facing don't happen in silos, and that is how academia and research often works. So we're bringing together faculty from across the college and different disciplines with different perspectives on this, from young children and their families with disabilities, to looking at community violence, to understanding youth who are justice involved, to understanding schools and community relations.

Thomas Bailey:
I think it's clear that this is an issue which requires many different perspectives. We've already talked about what's not just the youth, but it's also the parents, the teachers as well, but also any solution to this requires different perspectives and different fields to work together. So Claudia, Born This Way Foundation was co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, which tells us this organization has a unique origin story. So can you share the why behind the foundation and how it has shaped the specific work you do around youth mental health?

Claudia Fernandes:
Absolutely. So Born This Way Foundation was founded in 2012 by Lady Gaga and her incredible mother, Cynthia Bissett Germanotta. And it was out of deep personal experience. They both share this pretty broadly online. We call her LG. LG had unfortunately experienced bullying when she was a teenager, and she talks very openly and honestly about how it impacted her mental health. So together, Cynthia and LG created Born This Way Foundation because they both believed that had the world and the young people in the community been kinder and braver, it would've helped and supported her mental health. Our goal is to create a world that is kinder and braver that supports the mental health of young people, and we partner to do that work. So that's the story that they share, but I can speak also as someone who works at the foundation and truly can speak to what inspires me most about the two of them.
What a unique opportunity to have a mother and a daughter share their open and honest experience navigating mental health. I think that always has resonated with me because Cynthia very openly speaks about how sometimes she just didn't get it right. And it's so humbling to see and to hear that. And I think it serves as a role model in showing that, listen, this stuff is hard, and sometimes it's really challenging to have these conversations. And sometimes we as adults in young people's lives, we want to have the answers and come in and solve it and fix it. And sometimes you just want someone to listen. So that really set the foundation for the work we do in really supporting the community with tools to better support one another, which is why we have a Be There certificate. It's a free online course that teaches young people specifically how to support one another. And then too, why we also fund community-based organizations that provide supports and trusted adults to young people so they can be supported.

Thomas Bailey:
Following up on that though, since you've been inspired by what they've said, what does research tell us about what young people themselves are saying that they need the most? And how far off are the adults in schools from delivering that?

Claudia Fernandes:
That's such a great question. So the one thing is that young people are more likely to seek or to talk to their peers about their mental health challenges over family members. And that was from our Mary Christie research report. And I saw this firsthand in 2011 when I was a school leader at Bard High School Early College in Newark, New Jersey. I ended up launching an ambassador program, a peer ambassador program that empowered young people to become trusted sources of support, to just plant them inside the school, to look for one another, to really be my point people on the ground, really building that positive school climate. And I remember after a day of work, going back to my office and just scouring the internet and looking on the internet for just a training program, something just to train them and provide them with the skills to be able to safely support their peers, and I couldn't find anything.
And so interestingly enough, the foundation launched a year later and something was cooking. So it's a powerful reminder, again, just to listen to what young people are saying, create the interventions with them, and then share them and distribute them broadly, making sure that they know that they have access to these resources and tools to support one another.

Thomas Bailey:
So I think that's a good example of how to think about the mental health issues here beyond the kind of classic counselor working with students. Here's a crucial question where it's the peers who can provide that support. So Mel, let me ask you what you consider best practices in school mental health and behavioral health prevention identification and what interventions are important and is there a gap between best practices and what's actually taking place in schools?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Yeah, this question really drives my work. Schools are the de facto mental health setting for youth, full stop. But particularly in under-resourced communities where driving to appointments, following through on appointments, dealing with insurance, dealing with language barriers are so substantial. Schools can really be leaders in this space. There's much they can do. But of course there's barriers to getting that done. What this looks like ideally is positive and affirming environments for all, a positive school culture, trauma-informed, culturally-relevant support that is responsive to increasing needs that is provided rapidly as needed. But of course, even just that short list is challenging to make happen. Interventions may not be well fit to school settings. Educators may not have access to the needed training and support to put these pieces in place. Initiative fatigue is very real. And so schools need to think about not more, but different.
So reflecting on what are the supports that we are providing and how do we need to shift to be responsive to the current needs? I worked with a school a few years ago where after COVID, over 80% of their youth were getting individual counseling. It was taxing for their team, almost impossible to pull off. They weren't seeing the outcomes they were looking for. And so we worked with them to not do more, but do something differently. So what could they do to support their classroom teachers on the front line to provide social-emotional learning embedded into their everyday classroom practices? Where could they provide breaks throughout the day for supporting students to re-regulate? How did they want to think about building these skills that students could utilize themselves during the classroom day? Making the school day more enriching and supportive.
And so thinking about that full school day rather than that pullout counseling really allowed them to shift their practice from bucketing and outsourcing mental health support to thinking about enriching the environment and supporting the context to be different that the students experienced on a daily basis.

Thomas Bailey:
So a question for both of you. And Mel, you've just emphasized the importance of the school as an environment where students are obviously interacting and face kinds of struggles, but we're asking a lot from the schools. There's clearly some skills that teachers have to have. The list of things that both of you have talked about, they're not short. So schools are also overwhelmed already. So how do we realistically ask more of them without actually setting them up to fail? Claudia, why don't you take a stab at that first?

Claudia Fernandes:
Yeah, schools, of course, we know, they're essential. There's no doubt about that in this conversation, and they're already doing so much. And when I worked in New York City public school system at a dual language school, a lot of times the students came to our school from other countries and so did not speak English. As a result, we often had school refusal occur in the earlier stages because there was a resistance to coming to school because it didn't feel like home. They just left the place where they were born. They left their community. And the recommendation and the thing that I always love to say, the greatest gift you can give a child is the feeling of belonging, the feeling of joy. And so when you think about in that school, we had dances, we had dressed up days, we made field days inside the classrooms.
We got creative with also just making the school and the setting and the space a place where young people wanted to come and be. And truly it was magical to see because when you saw the students starting to really develop relationships, start to smile and giggle and laugh in the corner with other people, and then all of a sudden it wasn't one-on-one counseling that was needed. It was just a feeling of belonging, a feeling of joy inside the school. And that is something that I think I believe that many schools are already doing, and if not, can lean into more of that. Because the reality is school counselors, you've got 350, 500 kids, sometimes more. You can't do one-on-one counseling.

Thomas Bailey:
So Mel, what do you think as far as how we can do all of this? Sounds great, but without overwhelming the schools, overwhelming the teachers.

Mel Collier-Meek:
I couldn't agree more with what Claudia said. And I think the key is it's not more, it's different. And I know that there is a shift there that requires work and intention, but I think that we want to help schools to understand what they're already doing and look at the potential mismatch between the work that they're already doing and the outcomes or the support that they're hoping to provide. Was there initiative from eight years ago that's still limping along that maybe we could sunset and would free up some time for us to engage in different practices? So I think the key is supporting school leaders to look at their practices, look at the work that they're doing related to mental health, and help their school teams to pair back certain practices, focus in on those kind of tier one practices like connection, belonging, encouragement, breaks that have an outsize impact on student wellbeing.
And then really encouraging those small but meaningful practices while stepping back from practices that we just keep doing that maybe aren't making the difference, we hope.

Thomas Bailey:
Okay. So this is really a question for both of you, but I'll ask Mel first. Families. Certainly one of the crucial questions here is families. They both experience many of these problems, but they're also potential solutions. So Mel, what can we do to engage families in addressing these issues?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Absolutely. Families are key partners in this work. We need to treat them like the experts and colleagues and partners that they are. And we know families are struggling. So the first thing we can do is really be open to understanding what families need from us right now. And that will look different by community. Understanding that stressed families impact youth mental health and wellbeing and really invest in our families and the needs that they have local to the community that we're in. In the meantime, practices that schools and communities can adopt really looks like connecting regularly with families, providing practical support. Is it an afterschool program that maybe could go for 15 more minutes and make a huge difference in families' lives? Is it about helping families to figure out how to facilitate homework time? These practices can go a long way in modeling what effective wellbeing and support looks like for youth. So my first recommendation would just simply be to ask, listen, and be responsive to those needs.

Thomas Bailey:
So Claudia, that sounds like a comprehensive program. Do you have any additional thoughts on the family engagement?

Claudia Fernandes:
Yeah, I think about families a lot because families look different today and every family is unique and has a different definition. And so what we recognize though is that parents and caregivers alone should not be doing this on their own. We have to recognize that there is enormous burnout happening. We often say it takes a village to raise a child, and we have gotten rid of the village. And this is where the trusted adult, having someone in a young person's life, whether it can be a teacher, it can be a coach, it can be an auntie, an uncle, it can be someone in their life to provide support. When we create more of a supportive system around young people, the hope is that parents then don't feel like all of it is on them to figure it out alone, but that they feel like there's a network of trusted adults, caring adults around them.
And truly, it's just so important, as Mel was saying, for the parents to just stay connected with the community. I think that would be my takeaway is that parents can't do this alone, nor should they be expected to. How do we connect them to the resources and the support so they too feel like they have a broader community of support around them to support their child?

Thomas Bailey:
So Mel, we're wrapping up here. So if a school principal, a pediatrician, a parent, any community member is listening right now and wants to plug into this kind of work, what's the most important first step they could take now?

Mel Collier-Meek:
Yeah, I love this question, and it also feels so big. So we talked earlier about how big this crisis is and how overwhelmed folks that you've listed here are, community, school principals. And so I think that the next step is to really listen, listen to the youth that are there, listen to your school community about what the needs are, and really get clear-headed about the specific area to address. And that, again, may involve stepping back from certain things, strengthening the support around other practices, or finding new practices. But we want to really make sure that whatever we're doing, the new practices that we're putting in place are truly needed, aligned with the community, prevention-oriented, and the effort to do something new is really sustainable and meaningful. And that sort of practice can make a big difference.

Thomas Bailey:
So I really like the emphasis on not more, but different. I mean, nobody is sitting around not doing anything and be able to do something more, but clearly one needs to then have a clear understanding of what we're trying to do. And again, I think the prevention emphasis is obviously fundamental here. So Claudia, leave us with this. What's the message you most want a young person who is struggling to hear today?

Claudia Fernandes:
Yeah, I would say, and the focus on prevention starts with connection. Young people need communities where they belong. They need opportunities to co-create and contribute, peers to turn to, and trusted adults who will show up and communicate with their presence. I think sometimes we're really always trying to find like, "Oh, you have to be this, and you have to do this, and you have to know how to do this." And truly, I go thrifting with my partner's 14-year-old daughter, and sometimes we do not say a word. We are just quietly walking next to one another, thrifting and doing all the things. And I think maybe we say three words because connection doesn't necessarily mean sitting in front of one another and just talking. Connection is actually building trust and progress moves at the speed of trust. And so trust takes time to build. And so build that trust with your presence, build that trust with connection. And our responsibility is to listen to young people, learn from the research, and then work together to build those environments before a crisis occurs.

Thomas Bailey:
So this has really been a wonderful conversation, and I really appreciate the ideas that we have here that allow us to address this in a way that just doesn't overwhelm us. Obviously, counselors are pillars of a system that addresses the mental health issues, but they can't do that alone. And so I think we've talked here today about what parents can do, what teachers can do, what each student themselves can do, and what other students can do to build that kind of environment that will support students and address problems before they become acute. And the mental health of our youth is not a problem we can afford to wait on. What we've heard today when schools, families, and communities come together around prevention rather than just intervention, we can really make a difference.
So thank you to Dr. Claudia Fernandes and Dr. Mel Collier-Meek for this important conversation. And thank you for listening to Pursuing the Public Good. Please follow us wherever you listen. And if this episode resonates with you, be sure to share it with others. Thank you for listening.