Psychosocial Safety and Mental Health Management...

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Addressing Mental Distress with Mindfulness

The stress of gun violence in schools affects learning and leads to distress, being on edge and anger.

“When students are feeling any type of mental distress it may be very hard to learn, so their grades may suffer, or some students might even avoid going to school because of the fear and all of the negative emotions associated with gun violence that they may have witnessed at school,” says Young. “Educators may experience a fair amount of distress in terms of depression, anger and heightened sense of awareness or alertness. They may overreact to situations that they normally would not overreact to. Parents may experience anger for the school system’s inability to create a safe setting for their children, or they may have other challenges such as an increase or the initiation of substance use. The same could apply to educators and students as well.”

He adds, “Parents could also become overprotective to the point of smothering their children out of fear that something might happen to them, and in the extreme scenario, students might feel that they have to carry weapons themselves to defend themselves against the gun violence in the school.”

He points out that it is not natural to walk around in a heightened state of watchfulness or alertness because it increases the physiological indicators of stress, causing the person to walk around tense all the time. When this happens, he says, they should get mental help for it.

For students of color, he stresses that they have particular challenges because they may be in social environments in and out of school that may not be protective for them, and the feeling of being unprotected creates physiological changes, which increase stress hormones.

“It’s very important that educators and parents are very mindful that our students are under a lot of stress (from gun violence in schools), and we have to implement proactive ways to help them cope rather than ignoring it,” says Young, who serves as president of the Denver-Rocky Mountain Association of Black Psychologists.

Some mindfulness techniques he shares involve parents listening to their children, paying attention to what is going on with them, and spending more quality time with them so that they feel more comfortable sharing what their stressors are.

He recognizes, “There may not be a lot of therapists of color, but there are therapists available, and we need to use whatever resources are there. We can’t wait for there to be a critical mass of therapists of color because that may not happen in our lifetime, but we have to make sure that those therapists that are working with our children are able to use culturally congruent methods of helping our children cope with their distress. Gun violence is a horrible thing for a child to deal with.”

Overcoming Barriers with Nonjudgmental Attention and Resources

Barriers to students receiving mental health services after experiencing gun violence in schools, according to Young, involve their inability to have the words to describe what they are feeling emotionally and fear of judgement.

“Anger may come out as depression or because children oftentimes do not have the emotional literacy to properly label emotions, they may mislabel emotions. They may say they’re mad when what they are feeling is sad and depressed,” he says. “Parents and teachers can listen very closely to students and encourage them to speak about whatever distress they’re experiencing, without judgement and to have readily available resources that they can tap into within the school (which would make student engagement in getting the help that they need more likely).”

He adds, “Adults can be quite judgmental, particularly toward people in distress, particularly toward children. Children may shut down, they may not want to share because they may be labeled by their parents and educators as being weak or being dumb or something negative.”

Mental health resources that Young references include: the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration (BHA), Denver Center for Mental Health, Aurora Mental Health Center, and Jefferson County Mental Health Center. There are also behavioral health professionals that exist as private practitioners such as licensed professional counselors, clinical social workers, psychologists, and certified addiction counselors, as well as non-profit organizations that provide mental health counseling, he notes.

“The topic of gun violence in schools hits home because I grew up in Chicago where there was a lot of gun violence in the community but not in the schools because the school culture was nurturing from the teachers, and from each other, which created a safe environment, which is different from today’s school culture in Chicago and Colorado,” he laments. “I fear for my grandchildren in school because of the constant barrage of gun violence within the school and within the community. As long as we are not addressing gun violence within the community, it is going to be in the school. We have to somehow figure out how to address gun violence in a proactive way; we need to provide the psychosocial educational tools within the schools so that students will seek out nonviolent ways of resolving their difficulties and managing their anger.”.

Recommendations for Mental Health Resources

The Behavioral Health Administration of Colorado https://bha.colorado.gov/ WellPower https://www.wellpower.org/ (formerly known as the Mental Health Center of Denver)

Aurora Mental Health and Recover https://www.auroramhr.org/

Mental Health Services in Jefferson County https://www.jeffco.us/1881/MentalHealth-Services

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