By Brie Zeltner and Malaya Mason St. Louis, MO - More licensed therapists on campus. Requiring parent or guardian participation in all school safety discussions. Implementing “calm rooms” where students can go to center themselves. Making every school inclusive and welcoming of students of all genders, sexual identities, races and abilities. These are just some of the ways that Missouri high school students, members of a youth advisory board at St. Louis nonprofit Alive and W

By Brie Zeltner and Sarah Gandluri For Justin Soyka, the crisis came in middle school. During his 8th grade year, he survived two suicide attempts, and was hospitalized twice before he was able to get help for his depression, ADHD and crippling anxiety. “Growing up it wasn’t so easy not loving yourself and not being that ‘perfect image’ of what society portrays or what people expect,” Soyka, 18, told a group of youth peers during a recent discussion of the impacts of mental h

St. Louis, Missouri -- Feeling safe in school was a problem in Missouri even before the pandemic added the unprecedented element of fear and anxiety of being exposed to a potentially deadly virus. As schools moved to remote learning, many of the daily concerns about physical safety in schools-- from bullying to school shooters-- decreased. Yet mental health concerns, including feeling safe, comfortable and supported in the school environment, remained. That, and the return to

By Alan Gomez and Pamela Rentz With the world gripped by a global pandemic and protests over police brutality raging across the U.S., young adults and teenagers played a significant role in the activism work that defined 2020. Generation Z and Millenials were heavily involved in protests, marches, social media campaigns and the November elections. A majority of people who attended Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were under the age of 30 and young Americans turned out for

By Angely Pena Agramonte Teens today are under a lot of stress: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that the proportion of young people visiting an emergency department due to a mental health crisis climbed by 31 percent during the six months between April and October of 2020. And that’s amidst a global pandemic that has left many people afraid to seek treatment, especially in a hospital. It’s impossible to tell how many other young people were in

BY SAMARAH BENTLEY URBAN HEALTH MEDIA PROJECT NEW ORLEANS -- In one week, a patient of New Orleans clinical psychologist Dr. Baraka Perez lost three family members to COVID-19: Her father, brother and a nephew. "I'm seeing more of that than I care to," said Perez, who for 20 years has been helping children, adolescents and their parents cope with and move on from trauma. "My heart goes out to these people." As the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyone’s life, Black and oth