Our collective hearts are breaking for the families and community members of Uvalde, Texas. Most of us would give almost anything to turn back time to create safe schools and communities throughout the country. We can’t change the past, but going forward, how can we create that alternative future now? What would it take to address these issues in the midst of the current mental health crisis among young people?
Not by returning to the wild, wild West, that’s for sure.
A popular solution proposed by many pro-gun politicians and decision-makers is to put more guns in schools. I may not be a trained psychiatrist, but I’ve never heard of children being healed from trauma by adding even more guns and bullets to their classrooms. This scenario really sounds like a scene from a badly written old-fashion Western: give them guns, and if that doesn’t work, send more.
Instead of investing in mental health, our public officials have doubled down on security.
A much more reasonable, albeit less dramatic, way to decrease mass shootings would be to provide comprehensive mental health services to all children, in addition to evaluation support systems in schools and community centers. All of this could be a step forward but I doubt that would make a very good movie.
After most school shootings, the inevitable red flags surface: the many signs that the young person needed help. Instead of investing in mental health, our public officials have doubled down on security. Think about how differently these stories might have turned out if we’d chosen to invest in the emotional well-being of young people rather than in the school security theater that has turned out to be of little use.
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed my hometown of New Orleans, I joined with educators and activists to push for comprehensive mental health services in our schools and communities to help children cope with the trauma of having survived a disaster. Our ask wasn’t that big or particularly expensive: As many children who attend public schools in New Orleans are economically disadvantaged, making them eligible for free state health care, we simply argued to move these services into schools.
Yet even after multiple hurricanes and other traumatic events, we’re still making that same demand.
“How many times have we heard parents begging for resources for their children suffering from mental health crisis, with no resources to be found, their pleas for help met with silence?,” Rahsaan Ison, a New Orleans parent and activist, asked school officials.
In the wake of the pandemic, there is increasing awareness that children are struggling with mental health. All of the turmoil and pressure of growing up has been compounded by anxiety, depression, and fear during the past two years. And yet we know that the services that our children so desperately need simply aren’t there.
According to a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of all school districts across the country, serving more than 5 million students, do not have access to a school psychologist. When students returned to school last fall and were told that everything is “back to normal,” that included a lack of mental health support.
In New Orleans, threats of school shootings have also become a disturbing part of this “normal.” Local parent Courtney Clark says that she sees these active shooter threats at her children’s schools as a desperate cry for help.
“I wish I could attribute them to COVID-19, but [that] hit all over the world,” Clark adds. “When you combine mental issues with the chronic neglect and lack of investment into our kids’ well-being, this is what happens.”
A sixteen-year-old high school student in a New Orleans public school recently told me that he feels numb from all of the active shooter threats at his school. He’s convinced that only the community coming together can do something about the scourge of gun violence.
Thoughts and prayers have never healed anyone or made the community safer.
And he’s right. In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, politicians are already calling to invest more in school safety. The question they should be asking instead is what does real safety look like? But until we shift our focus to the mental health and overall well-being of children and adolescents, “hardening” schools will only compound the trauma they’re already experiencing. We must expand our definition of safety, and make sure that the funds that school districts currently devote to it include mental health services.
While the conversation has quickly turned to gun control, that’s not enough. We must also talk about comprehensive mental health care and how we can prioritize the health and well-being of our children and communities.
When you don’t care for children who are experiencing mental health crises, or ignore their parents when they are begging for resources, the problems get worse. We end up with young people who hate themselves and the world that they live in, delusions and psychotic episodes giving way to incredible violence, and devastation that can impact families and communities for years to come.
Thoughts and prayers—no matter how many times politicians send them—have never healed anyone or made the community safer. We need to stop pretending that everything is normal, because it’s not. Spending every moment expecting to die is not a way to live.