High school senior Arianna Bouzi said her mental health was in a dark place last year.
“The whole pandemic kind of made my academic skills go down. And I felt really lost in a sense,” the 17-year-old said. “I didn’t really know how to socialize again.”
Bouzi, who describes herself as bisexual and Haitian, said she felt anxious when she was in school, which led her to miss about half of her junior year. She believes most of it had to do with struggling to socialize after learning remotely during the pandemic.
“It’s like your body is all tense, you feel really tense all the time, and you feel like everything is going to happen. Everything wrong is going to happen to you. So you don’t even want to step outside,” she said.
Mental Health Crisis
Bouzi’s experience is shared by many others. A report by Rhode Island Kids Count found young people are in “a mental health crisis both nationally and in Rhode Island.”
“We had seen increased rates of anxiety and depression prior to the pandemic, but then when the pandemic hit and young people were at home or away from their peers, were not able to be learning in school, it got worse,” said Stephanie Geller, the deputy director at Rhode Island Kids Count.
Geller wrote the report, which describes how mental health issues are at “higher rates among Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) youth.”
“One of the things that they talk about is racism that they experience in their community, racism they experience online,” Geller said. “Members of the LGBTQ+ community talk about lack of acceptance and isolation in their own families when their parents don’t accept them as well as how they feel in their schools and community and the way that they’re received or what they see online in terms of negative comments about their identities.”
Suicide Attempts Among Rhode Island High School Students
Geller analyzed data collected from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is distributed to high school students nationwide every two years. It found that in 2023, “nine percent of Rhode Island high school students reported attempting suicide one or more times during the past year. Black and Hispanic/Latino teens consistently have higher rates of suicide attempts than white teens.”
“I think that it really shows the struggles that young people are facing, the lack of confidence in themselves, the lack of acceptance they’re feeling, the lack of support they’re feeling, and this anxiety and depression that we are seeing is translating to unfortunately to action,” Geller said.
Recommendations to Address Mental Health Crisis
One of the recommendations Geller writes about in the report is the need for funding to increase the number of mental health professionals in schools.
“When we talk to young people about any policy they want to see passed, this is their number one ask. They’ve been working, a number of the organizations have been involved in a campaign called ‘Counselors not Cops,’ which is around trying to get school resource officers out of school and use that funding to replace them with mental health providers,” Geller said.
Another recommendation in the report: recruit and retain more diverse mental health providers.
“People talked about being more willing to seek help and to stay with a provider when that provider reflects their own identities, when that provider looks like them, speaks their language, understands their experiences,” Geller said.
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This story is part of our Finding Hope Project. Finding Hope is generously sponsored by Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross & Blue Shield Association.
