'State of Emergency': WPI dean, others join Congressman McGovern for panel on youth mental health at UMass

WORCESTER — Doctors, students and providers sounded alarm bells about youth mental health Wednesday at a UMass Chan Medical School panel hosted by U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern.

“We’ve already been in a mental health crisis (pre-pandemic),” UMass Dr. Yael Dvir told McGovern and House colleague U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin. “Now we’re in a state of emergency.”

Dvir was among seven panelists who deal with youth mental health to share concerns and frustrations with McGovern, D-Worcester and Raskin, D-Maryland, for well over an hour at the Albert Sherman Center.

McGovern said he called the event in the hopes of getting insight on what policymakers can do to impact a problem increasingly impacting the country’s youth.

“We all struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic and we are seeing every single day what happens when a country doesn’t have mental health support systems in place, especially for young people,” he said.

Suicides and mass shootings

McGovern said about one out of 15 high school students nationwide attempt suicide each year and noted the “heartbreaking series of suicides,” at Worcester Polytechnic Institute within the past year.

He also referenced the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas saying it is “time for us to stop blaming these shootings solely on our mental health crisis.

“Every country in the world is facing an uptick in mental health challenges due to COVID,” he said. “But the bottom line is that only in America, where an 18-year-old can buy an AR-15 with no questions asked, do we see these horrific mass shootings.”

After making opening remarks, McGovern and Raskin — who hosted an event together in Northampton Tuesday night — listened as panelists took turns detailing holes in the system.

Panelists — two UMass Chan Medical School doctors, two UMass Chan Medical School students, a WPI neuroscientist/dean and a pair of administrators for mental health providers — touched on a variety of concerns.

Destigmatizing mental health struggles, increasing funding for research and normalizing the conversation surrounding mental health were areas of broad agreement.

Normalizing mental health conversations

Fred Kaelin of the Shine Initiative, a local nonprofit that works to provide mental health services in schools, said kids often remark that it’s adults who aren’t ready to talk about mental health.

Kaelin and other panelists agreed that conversations around mental health need to be normalized as early as possible and baked into curriculum the same way things like sex education are.

Kaelin said that it’s much harder to help an 18-year-old address years of dormant issues than it is to help children understand and talk about mental health from a younger age.

For that reason, Kaelin said, the approximately 45 schools his nonprofit deals with have increasingly asked it to focus on younger and younger students.

Finding adults to trust with feelings can be hard for kids, Kaelin said, recounting a sad question he said kids often have about which crisis hotlines have the “friendliest” staff.

Incivility on social media

Incivility was another common theme discussed Wednesday, with panelists raising alarms that the nasty tenor of civil discourse, especially on social media, has exacerbated kids’ anxieties and isolated, rather than connected them.

Raskin said such concerns are behind a bill he’s pushing that would supply $40 million for the first National Institutes of Health study on the impacts of social media.

Dvir, a UMass child and adolescent psychiatrist, said there needs to be some limits placed on what kids can do on social media.

Dvir said she has never seen the mental health crisis among children as bad as it is now and added that many overburdened frontline workers are leaving the field, exacerbating concerns.

Dvir said one child on the pediatric floor has been without a bed for 104 days.

“We have nine in the pediatric emergency department and we have six in the emergency mental health service,” she said.

Dvir said the state is helping to soon put 200 additional beds online, but opined that more needs to be done including higher pay for workers.

“Just being able to keep my people working in the trenches and doing OK for the past 2 1/2 years, has been a lot,” she said.

Dvir said the adolescent community care units the hospital operates at the Worcester Recovery Center — which she said are the only such units statewide — are seeing a “level of acuity” she has never seen in her career.

“There is anger and aggression that is very difficult for staff to manage,” she said.

Dvir said a state system where pediatricians can call for access to child psychiatrists has seen an uptick of 140% in calls, with some referring doctors feeling overwhelmed.

“I used to be able to get really worried if a child told me that they were having suicidal thoughts,” Dvir quoted one doctor as telling her recently. “And now I only get really worried if they tell me that they’re having active suicidal thoughts and an actual plan.”

WPI student deaths

Jean King, a WPI neuroscientist who serves as the school’s dean of arts and sciences, spoke Wednesday about efforts the school has taken following a string of student suicides that left the campus shaken. 

At least three students took their own lives from July 2021 to January 2022, a school report found. The deaths — as well as four other student deaths in the past year — have drawn attention to the school, which, King said, has done its best to address the issue.

King, who was already working on researching the brains of people with mental illness following a 2019 donation from an alumni who lost a daughter to suicide, said the school has involved everyone on campus in its search for answers.

The school has made 24-hour-a-day “telehealth” appointments available to students, she said, though she recognized that’s not something all institutions have the resources to do.

King said she has learned through the process that the stressors affecting students are not "homogeneous."

Students of color and those in the LGBT communities, for instance, have specific struggles others may not, she said, particularly when it comes to issues of stigmatization.

King said she anticipates it will take researchers some time to get answers from neuroscience about mental health, but said there is no time to waste in looking at holistic solutions.

“We need to utilize the urgency of 'now' to do something about this,” she said.

Cause for optimism

Panelists agreed the current crises facing the country present an opportunity to talk about the mental health emergency and get something done.

Raj Patel, a 50-year-old former salesman enrolled in UMass’ graduate nursing school, said as grim as the conversation can be, the fact it’s being had at all is cause for optimism.

Patel said as a kid, nobody talked about such issues, so the fact that children and adults recognize the issue and are trying to tackle it now is heartening.

McGovern thanked panelists for their ideas, which also included suggestions to increase funding to lessen economic disparities — often known as the social determinants of health — that also underpin mental health struggles.

He said while it’s helpful to have the discussion, he wishes there was a more knit-together plan that experts in various fields could settle on to help lawmakers attempt change .

McGovern asked that panelists consider a follow-up discussion for the future — perhaps with a key government administrator — to ensure events like Wednesday’s are not mere “lip service.”

Raskin stressed that politicians also need to address gun violence, noting that such violence itself is causing collective anxiety.

“The gun violence problem makes our mental health problems much worse,” he said. “There are so many disorders that grow up in a society where you wake up and you see children being assassinated in school.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: "State of Emergency": WPI dean, others join Congressman McGovern for panel on youth mental health at UMass