According to the Missouri Department of Mental Health's 2024 Missouri Student Survey, nearly 35% of school aged kids in the state report feeling hopeless at times.
Amy Hill, the Executive Vice President for school-based services at Centerstone, a multi-state behavioral health organization, lives and works in Springfield. She spoke about the gap that still exist for youth mental — and how schools can help.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Amy Hill: There's a lot of attention, really, on youth mental health — rightfully so. I mean, obviously, I'm a big advocate for youth mental health. I think there's been a ton of attention on youth mental health.
A lot of that, I believe, is coincided with social media and the creation of the smartphone, right? And all of the things that kids have access to now.
It's just a different environment than perhaps when I was growing up or my parents were growing up, and so, I think it's getting a lot more attention.
I also think we've done a lot of work on the stigma related to mental health — I still think we have a lot of work to do, but I definitely feel like over the last 20 or 30 years, we've done a lot of work on that.
So, I'm seeing children and adolescents become more open to talk about mental health, more encouraging with their peers to seek out mental health services, just more of an engagement around mental health in general.
I think the long and the short of it is that — no, things aren't getting better. I think we're getting better at identifying needs, but I wouldn't say that the curve is getting better in regard to how our youth are feeling.
We do know that lots of our youth are experiencing anxiety. Anxiety and depression are going to be the most common childhood symptoms and diagnoses that you're going to see, particularly anxiety. About 50%, really, 45 to 50% of all youth express feeling very anxious.
We also know 20% of all kids in our state truly do have a diagnosable mental illness, you know, one out of four, one out of five, depending on what research you look at or walking around every single day needing help for something.
Yet there's a really large gap from the first symptom to the first intervention when it comes to mental health.
So right now, there's an eight-to-10-year gap from the first time a kid experiences feeling anxious or sad or whatever, before there's ever an intervention.
I always say it's like a kindergarten student showing signs and symptoms of cancer and seeing the oncologist for the first time in the eighth, ninth or 10th grade.
We know that student would most likely not still be alive, but that's exactly what it looks like when it comes to treating mental illness and mental health symptoms for our kids.
And we know that schools are the best place to receive those services — 80% of all kids who ever receive a mental health intervention in their life will do so within a school setting. That could be a school counselor or a school social worker or a provider like us.
We know early identification and intervention is key to everything, right? It's key to education. You've gotta, catch kids early. It leads to preventing common physical health problems, and it's certainly key to preventing long-term issues with mental health for our entire population.
The more likely we can bring these services to kiddos when they're younger, the much more likely they are to be successful as adults and not need intervention and treatment.
