Every other Wednesday, a group of teens from IHS, LACS, Dryden, and New Roots meet at the Ithaca Youth Bureau (IYB) to tackle issues affecting the teens of Tompkins County. Youth Council is a student-led organization that meets with local representatives and elected officials to represent the youth of Tompkins County. The mission of the Ithaca Youth Council Ambassadors is to “listen and speak for the youth of Tompkins County.” They have met with principals from various school districts, Superintendent Luvelle Brown, Rusty Keeler from the Free Range Kids organization, Melanie Little from the Mental Health Association, Mayor Svante Myrick, and others. Their focus areas are promoting mental health awareness, creating safe and free spaces for teens, and addressing racism and discrimination in school. This year, the Mental Health Awareness group’s main focuses are to understand ways to address teen mental health issues, and to dispel misconceptions and stereotypes in the community.
To help teens in Tompkins County improve their knowledge of healthy coping mechanisms and the state of their overall mental health, the first step taken to listen to what the students themselves had to say. To gauge student input, the group created a survey that was sent to the ICSD Community and beyond. 85.4 percent of students across all schools said that they knew someone who was struggling with mental health issues. Many of the responses were similar between schools, but the responses greatly differed when it came to the question that had to do with mental health support systems between schools.
This difference in perspective was especially present in the results to the question, “If you were to experience a problem with your own mental health, would you feel safe talking with someone in your school about it?” Four main schools were surveyed, and in the end, 45 percent of the IHS students who took the survey responded that they would not feel comfortable talking to someone in the school, 20 percent said they were not sure, and 35 percent said that they would. This result came in stark contrast to the answers from LACS, which conveyed that 45 percent of students who were surveyed would feel comfortable, 26 percent were unsure, and 29 percent would not feel comfortable. In addition to these two vastly different results, in the New Roots survey results, 37.5 percent replied that they would feel comfortable, 37.5 percent replied that they would not feel comfortable, and 25 percent were unsure. When it came to Dryden students, 38 percent replied that they would feel comfortable, 22 percent replied that they would not be comfortable, and 40 percent were unsure. However, it should be taken into account that the framing of this question was very open-ended. Despite this, these statistics do reveal important issues regarding the strength of the school community and students’ perceptions of the resources that are available for them.
The survey results and comments indicate that mental health education is lacking in all of the schools, including at IHS. What is lacking at IHS that could be improved? How can things as a whole be improved? Should IHS follow the model for mental health resources and support systems implemented at other schools, such as LACS? Students have the power to determine the answers to these questions and to help create these shifts; they also have the power to help work towards de-stigmatization through talking openly about mental health with friends and peers.