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Mostly Cloudy Five Towns schools, Northwell partner to battle kids' Covid trauma
After nearly two full years of the coronavirus pandemic, the mental health crisis among school-age children is at its peak.
According to the most recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental health-related emergency department visits nationwide increased 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11, and 31 percent for young people ages 12 to 17, from March 2020, the first weeks of the pandemic, to October 2020.
And many experts contend that the stress children are feeling has only worsened as the crisis has dragged on.
To attack the problem and hopefully make inroads locally, the Hewlett-Woodmere School District and the Lawrence School District have joined forces with Northwell Health’s Behavioral Health Center in Rockville Centre, Hewlett-Woodmere for the past two years and Lawrence since last July.
The health center is a collaboration among Cohen Children’s Medical Center and several other school districts that opened in January 2020.
“Lawrence entered the collaborative with Northwell to get students help quickly with counselors, psychologists and social workers,” Dr. Karen Mackler, the Lawrence district psychologist, ex-plained. The overarching problem caused by the pandemic, she said, is that “kids lost out on a typical school environment,” and “the kids are struggling to have relationships.”
The mask debate is another issue that can raise a child’s stress level, Mackler said, because of mixed messaging. At school, students are told to war a mask, but at home, or through public discourse, they hear opposing views.
Laura Peterson, Hewlett-Woodmere’s executive director for special education services, said, “There [have] always been your anxious students.” She noted that the pandemic is “ongoing trauma,” compared with other crises, such as the Sept. 11 attacks or Hurricane Sandy, which had what she called an “endpoint.” “We are not necessarily seeing that light at the end of the tunnel, “ Peterson said. “We’re seeing that trauma reborn.”
To battle it, the Behavioral Health Center has a multi-pronged approach, said Associate Vice President for Northwell’s School of Mental Health Dr. Vera Feuer, offering, first, a wide array of clinical services, including assessment to avoid emergency hospital visits, connecting families with child psychologists, crisis therapy, medications and support through the steps of treatment.
The second prong is the center’s close partnership with the schools to help support teachers’ work with students on things like regulating emotions.
The third prong, Feuer said, is community education and outreach, in collaboration with Cohen Children’s Medical Center, which has been done mostly virtually during the pandemic but, officials hope, will become in-person in the near future.
“The most common scenario is kids struggling with depression and anxiety and struggling to get back to school,” Feuer said. “With underlying depression, you start treatment to get them back in the school environment, because the longer that you stay out of school, the harder is to go back.”
Mackler said that much trauma research concludes that building relationships and having support are keys to easing anxiety and depression.
“Parents, relatives, a trusted adult, anyone who hears you,” she said, can be a support. “If you have a person to talk to, someone who smiles at you in the morning. It’s really an important message that there is stability and a safe place for our children. Even if things are not consistent and constant, they come here and it’s a community.”
Saying that there are “more students with students with greater anxiety,” Peterson added that partnering with Northwell has created greater access to treatment for children and families and facilitated professional development workshops. “We are doing everything to address this,” she said, referring to the children’s mental health crisis.
While returning to “normal” appears to be the goal for many, Feuer cautions against talking about “back to normal.” Instead she advises highlighting children’s strengths as life moves forward.
“Tell them to use the skills they have,” she said. And though the challenges students have overcome might be stressful, facing them is how they cope. “If we can do that to get them through the realities,” Feuer said, “they will learn their own strengths.”
