Did you know that there are over 20 different LGBTQ flags?
Each has their own meaning and tell a story of individuals and groups within the LGBTQIA+ community, represented by the various colors in stripes, shapes, and symbols.
Supporting Teachers and The Work They are Doing. As a mental health therapist who has worked many years alongside teachers within the school system, I have a deep appreciate for the work that they do
Dr. Andrea Hutchinson’s drive to improve mental health providers’ lives has quickly established her as a leader
in the mental health community. Dr. Hutchinson’s practice, Care Counseling, fights for therapists by providing
support and training necessary to say things like CARE has 7x less clinician turnover than the national average.
When Cathy Moen’s son, Elijah, was in first grade, he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She took him to the pediatrician, who put him on medication and suggested therapy.
The medication part was easy. But getting him therapy proved more difficult — not because Moen couldn’t find a therapist or didn’t have insurance, but because of logistics.
The appointments were always during the day, and between her work schedule and the traffic, it was nearly impossible for them to make it.
But she soon learned Elijah was able to see a therapist in his Bloomington school. More than 15 years ago, Minneapolis Public Schools helped pioneer a national model of bringing community mental health care directly to its students. Today, most of the public schools in Minneapolis — more than 50 of them — have a therapist on site, and many other districts, like Elijah’s, have followed suit.
These days, Elijah’s therapist simply walks down the hall and pulls him from class.
“This is like a godsend,” said Moen.
The family’s health insurance pays for the care the same way it would if the student were being seen in the clinic. The school program was designed so that no student in need will be turned away for lack of insurance.
The Minneapolis program has also provided a road map for schools across the country as more administrators realize that mental health is as important to students’ future success as academics. Studies have shown that students are more likely to show up for appointments when the therapists are on-site.
More and more states are making mental health care in schools a priority. At least two states have recently passed laws that require schools to teach mental health. And more are considering it.
But the benefit of having a therapist on-site goes beyond just getting students to see a therapist. In Minneapolis, it’s also helped make mental health a school-wide priority — and helped get counselors, teachers and others more involved, said Mark Sander, who helped start the district program.
“Those teachers start learning more and more [about mental health],” said Sander, who directs school mental health for the district and the county.
He said as they learn more about mental health, teachers are feeling like, “‘OK, I get it. And now, you know, I’ve got this other student who’s not diagnosed with anxiety but has some of those anxiety features. And now I know how to better support them.”
At South High School in Minneapolis, the therapists sit in the school clinic, the same one where students go if they feel sick during the day or to get a physical so they can play sports.
The issues the students bring to the therapist run the gamut from stress about grades and colleges to anxiety related to a bad situation at home.
Farah Hussein is a therapist at South. She said it’s hard being a teenager, and she tries to help.
“There’s a lot of conversations about, ‘Who am I? Where do I fit in the world? Where do I belong?’ and just a lot of distress in exploring that,” she said.
All of this has important implications for the students’ well-being beyond just their mental health.
Sharon Hoover, who co-directs the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said more schools are collecting data on outcomes of in-school mental health programs, and the results are clear.
“They are more likely to have good attendance and to graduate and to get improved grades. We even have documentation of having better standardized test scores when you put universal systems in place like classroom-wide social emotional learning,” she said, all of which makes for happier, better adjusted students.
Cathy Moen, the mother whose son, Elijah, is in therapy in school, said she doesn’t know if it’s the medicine, or the therapy, or just that he’s growing up, but she — and his teachers — are already seeing a difference.
By: Bridget Eickhoff, MA, Alison Dolan, Psy.D., LP, and Andrea Hutchinson, Psy.D., LP
Being a therapist can be a fulfilling and rewarding career. However, it can be hard to remember that therapists are humans who also experience anxiety, stress, and burnout. We took a survey of 30 clinicians at CARE Counseling asking what makes them feel successful and balanced at work. Here are the main points our amazing clinicians found that help them find balance when working with a full caseload.
When Dr. Jeff Hardwig started his job as a psychiatrist in his hometown near the Canadian border, he wasn’t sure there was enough work for him.
Pretty soon, it became clear that there was, in fact, plenty of work in International Falls, Minn., a town of 6,000 people. He split his time between a group family practice and community mental health center and also saw patients in nearby communities.
“Within two or three years, it was clear I was too busy to go out of town anymore,” he said.
After nearly 30 years working as the town’s sole psychiatrist, Hardwig retired in September, leaving no psychiatrists for more than 100 miles around. His departure underscores a difficult reality: A national shortage of psychiatrists is much more acute in rural and remote areas, which leaves many people without access to the kind of services they need.
And the demand for Hardwig’s services has never let up.
Wendy Dougherty, the nurse who worked with him at the clinic, said his calendar was always full.
“He never ever … in the five years I worked with him, ever had an empty slot,” she said. “And one thing about his patients, if they called and canceled, that empty slot was filled by somebody that had been waiting two months to get in.”
But, she said, he was also the kind of doctor who would always find a way to squeeze in somebody in a crisis, even if it meant missing lunch or canceling his own meetings.
The clinic where Hardwig worked is a primary care center on the outskirts of town, part of the Duluth-based Essentia Health system. It’s a low-slung building across the street from a Menards and a Dollar Tree that offers all the basic services, including annual checkups and mammograms.
Hardwig and others agree that the need for a psychiatrist in town was there, but until he arrived, people mostly counted on their primary care doctors to handle it.
His patients’ diagnoses over the years ran the spectrum of diseases, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“I had to take care of people of all ages — all the way through to the nursing home,” he said. “You can’t really specialize if you’re in a small town. You take all comers.”
And working in a small town, he also couldn’t avoid running into his patients frequently. It might have been hard for some doctors — psychiatry is a profession that particularly prizes its discretion — but Hardwig says he didn’t mind.
“I just had sort of an agreement with my patients if they say ‘hi’ to me, I’ll say ‘hi’ back, but I won’t otherwise out them. And my wife knew not to ask, ‘How do you know that person?’” he said.
He said his patients were respectful of him, too, and didn’t try to squeeze in consultations in line at the grocery store or when he was out to dinner.
One of his longtime patients was a man named Daniel Carr, whom I met at a clubhouse run by a community mental health center where people with serious mental illness can spend their time. The cozy house has battered couches and an armchair in the living room. A Christmas tree sparkles near the front window.
Carr, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was Hardwig’s patient for 25 years. He says he misses Hardwig.
“He knew exactly about how to treat me,” Carr said.
“I had some trouble with my medicine changing a little one way or the other, but he usually knew what was best. I’d tell him what I was experiencing and he knew what to do.”
Hardwig wouldn’t talk about specific patients, including Carr. Carr said his psychiatric care has been transferred back to his primary care doctor, and that it’s been going OK so far.
But Wendy Dougherty, the nurse who worked with Hardwig, said some of the primary care doctors have been less than enthusiastic about taking on the psychiatrist role.
“Jeff took care of the hard ones,” she said. “The schizophrenics, the bipolars … these docs kind of put up their hands and say, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what meds to give them.’”
The psychiatric nurse practitioner Hardwig worked with is still at the clinic and handles some of the harder cases, but she’s planning to retire soon, too.
International Falls is hardly alone in not having a psychiatrist — particularly in remote areas.
More than 90 percent of psychiatrists only work in urban areas, even though more than 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas. In Minnesota, nearly every county — aside from the Twin Cities metro and Rochester area — is considered to have a shortage of mental-health professionals as determined by federal guidelines.
Hardwig said the hardest part of working in such a remote area was that he didn’t have a continuum of care to work with.
“There just isn’t that inpatient bed when you need it. We have only one crisis bed and we haven’t had that the whole time I’ve lived here. We don’t have residential treatment,” he said.
And International Falls is luckier than some places because there’s a community mental health clinic in town. (Hardwig partnered with it until his retirement, and the nurse practitioner still does.) The clinic is looking to expand in the near future. There’s also a mobile crisis team in town that can help with emergencies.
Still, recruiting mental-health care providers, even those who aren’t psychiatrists, to remote areas is challenging. Paul Mackie, a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, has studied the problem. And he said the only way to recruit and retain people in remote areas is to grow them from scratch. That is how Hardwig, who grew up in International Falls, ended up there.
Mackie said there are already physical medicine programs that train people for practice in rural areas. And he said now we need to do the same for mental health, too.
“We need to be a lot more thoughtful about who we’re recruiting and how we’re recruiting them,” he said. “We can have that conversation around what does a rural practitioner look like and look for that person and encourage them.”
But that takes time. People who graduated from high school this year won’t be done with medical school until 2027. And then they still have to complete their residency and any other specialty training.
So in the meantime, International Falls — and communities like it — are doing what they can. Hardwig’s old clinic has hired a child psychiatrist who sees her patients remotely over Skype-like technology.
Finding people to work on-site is proving much trickier, though. It was two years ago that Hardwig told the clinic he was planning to retire. It’s been looking for a replacement since then. But nobody has applied for the job.
I love teaching writing; it’s where revelations happen, where children plumb the dark corners, nudge the sleeping dogs, and work out solutions to their most convoluted dilemmas. As much as I adore reading student work, I still get a little nervous about what I’ll find there. Among the stories of what my teenage students did last summer and what they want to be when they grow up are the more emotionally loaded accounts: firsts (periods, kisses, or failures), transitions (moves, their parents’ divorces, or custody disputes), and departures (dropouts, graduations, or suicide attempts).
Over the years, my students have entrusted me with their most harrowing moments: psychotic hallucinations, sexual molestation, physical abuse, substance abuse, HIV exposures, and all sorts of self-injurious behavior ranging from cutting to starvation to trichotillomania. When students write about delicate and dangerous experiences, there are decisions to be made and judgments to be called. And yet, for much of my career, I have been horribly unprepared and have failed to secure the services my students needed as a result.
Teachers are often the first person children turn to when they are in crisis, and yet they are, as a profession, woefully unprepared to identify students’ mental-health issues and connect them with the services they need—even when those services are provided by schools. Aside from the obligatory professional-development session on mandatory reporting laws for child abuse and neglect we have to attend during new faculty orientation, teachers receive little or no education in evidence-based mental-health interventions. According to Darcy Gruttadaro, Director of Advocacy and Public Policy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “Most teachers are not trained about mental health in their formal education and degree programs, and yet an unidentified mental-health condition often interferes with a student’s ability to learn and reach their full academic potential.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately one in five children currently have or will experience a severe mental disorder. For some disorders, such as anxiety, the rates are even higher. For people who do experience mental-health disorders, most experienced their first symptoms before young adulthood. Half of all people with mental disorders experienced the onset of symptoms by age of 14; 75 percent by age 24. Half of these students will drop out of school. As suicide is the second-leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults, lack of appropriate mental-health interventions and treatment can mean the difference between life and death. Given the amount of time children spend at school, teachers are likely be the ones to identify and refer children for mental-health services. For children fortunate enough to be identified and given access to those services, treatment will mostly likely take place at school, as schools serve as the primary providers of mental services for children in this country.
However, all the mental-health services in the world won’t help if teachers don’t understand the nature of the services available in school and can’t identify the students in need of intervention.
In 2011, researchers at the University of Missouri looked at whether teachers understood the 10 evidence-based mental-health interventions or resources their schools employed. The results were disheartening, to say the least. While two-thirds of the surveyed teachers held graduate degrees, and the remaining third had earned undergraduate degrees, more than 80 percent had never heard of some of the interventions or strategies their own school utilized. Half of the teachers surveyed did not know if their schools provided functional behavioral assessment or intervention planning at all. Given that the response rate for this study was only 50 percent—and it’s likely that teachers with a heightened interest in student mental health would be more likely to respond to the survey—these results probably overstate teachers’ understanding of the tools their own school districts use to support students’ mental and emotional health.
As an increasing number of schools roll out evidence-based mental-health programs such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), teaching that promotes appropriate student behavior by proactively defining, teaching, and supporting positive student conduct, and Trauma-Sensitive Schools, programs aimed at reducing the effects of trauma on children’s emotional and academic well-being, educators need to be at least minimally conversant in the terminology, methods, and thinking behind these strategies. These programs provide strategies that can be highly effective, but only if the teachers tasked with implementing them are sufficiently trained in the basics of mental-health interventions and treatment.
Teachers routinely receive first-aid training in CPR, EpiPen use, and safe body fluid cleanup, but it’s rare for schools to offer training in mental health, said Todd Giszack, Academic Dean of Fork Union Military Academy in Fork Union, Virginia. Recognizing that schools are responsible for their students’ mental, as well as physical health, Fork Union Military Academy designed and implemented its own curriculum with the help of two mental-health professionals, and now offers eight-hour certification programs in Mental Health First Aid. “It has taken two years, but nearly all of our faculty and staff has become certified in Mental Health First Aid. This has allowed our school community to become familiar with trends and warning signs associated with adolescent emotional and mental health” Giszack said.
Dr. Michael Hollander, Assistant Professor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of Training and Consultations on the 3East Dialectical Behavioral Therapy program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, urges teachers to use caution when intervening in students’ mental-health crises. “In my experience, teacher response tends to be bi-modal; either they get solicitous, over-involved, and in over their head, or they mistake mental health issues for behavioral problems that require in-class discipline.”
Programs such as NAMI’s Parents and Teachers as Allies presentation are beneficial, Dr. Hollander said, because they help teachers understand both the benefits and limitations of in-class interventions. Despite his worries about teacher-facilitated mental health interventions, he’s grateful for the trend toward a greater understanding of students’ mental health. “We have arrived at a place where we finally understand that teaching is not just about educating someone’s rational mind, but also educating their heart,” he said.
Children with untreated mental-health issues can get by. They can limp along toward adulthood until an inevitable, eventual mental-health crisis lands them in the hospital, in jail, or even at an inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility for adolescents, where I teach. But by then, a lot of damage has been done to their young minds and hearts—damage that could have been prevented if they had received support when their symptoms first appeared.
As I read their essays about crippling childhood anxiety, alcoholic parents, and/or domestic violence, I can’t help but mourn for all the lost opportunities and squandered potential that was wasted on the way.
