Social Media and the Teen Mental Health Crisis

 SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LAW

Subcommittee Hearing

Date: Tuesday, November 7th, 2023

Time: 10:00am

Location: Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 226

Presiding: Chair Blumenthal

Social Media and the Teen Mental Health ... | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

TONIGHT: County Govt. Secret Meeting on One and Only Crisis Center to be Built in Rockville. No Agenda, Not on Calendar, No Zoom Link.

Montgomery County Government is in the process of planning for the construction of a crisis center to be located in Rockville, Maryland.  The crisis center is called the RESTORATION CENTER.  The County is constructing exactly ONE Restoration Center for the entire County.  Once built, if you or a loved one experiences a mental health or substance use crisis you or your loved one can be transferred to this facility by first responders from anywhere in the County.   

Damascus, Silver Spring, Cabin John, Aspen Hill, Poolesville, Germantown, Burtonsville, Friendship Heights, Wheaton, Olney and everywhere else in the County. This will be YOUR one and only crisis center.  The time is now to pay attention to what services will be offered at this facility and what options will exist for those transferred to this emergency facility by local hospitals, first responders, county crisis service providers, and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

A meeting is being held tonight, April 20, 2023, at 7 PM but Montgomery County Government has not listed the meeting on their calendar or on the webpages dedicated to this project.  

Only residents in the City of Rockville have a clue that this meeting has been scheduled.  For the rest of the County, good luck.

What is a Restoration Center?

A Restoration Center is a 24/7/365 facility that provides voluntary, short-term stabilization services to individuals experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis. By establishing a Restoration Center, the County aims to divert individuals in crisis from hospital emergency rooms, and thereby reduce the current burden on first responders and emergency personnel, and free up resources for medical emergencies.

NYC to pay $500 to nearly 1,000 parents to address mental health needs at their schools

The education department is launching a training program next month for parents, paying them $500 to become “wellness ambassadors” addressing mental health needs in their school communities.

The initiative will pay the stipend to parent leaders from roughly 950 schools in neighborhoods hardest hit by the coronavirus, according to Adrienne Austin, an acting deputy chancellor who oversees parent outreach. She revealed a “sneak peek” of the plan Thursday to members of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council.

“We’re looking to support parent leaders in those schools to become ambassadors for wellness,” Austin told parents.

The mental health toll on the nation’s largest school system this year has been enormous. Many families have suffered from job losses, increased food insecurity, and the death of loved ones. Parents have had to make difficult decisions about whether to send their children back to school buildings or keep them home full time. More than 70% of children opted to learn exclusively from home, but many of those who returned to buildings did so part time or experienced frequent shutdowns because of positive coronavirus cases...

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/4/9/22376133/parent-ambassador-mental-health-stipend-nyc

‘It’s OK to not be OK’: How one high school saved lives with a 34-question survey

It was 10:30 a.m. on a Monday in April. Nine counselors, psychologists, and therapists sat around a table in a conference room at Cañon City High School in southern Colorado.

In classrooms around the building, the school’s ninth-graders whizzed through an online mental health survey that would soon deliver real-time data to the group in the conference room. They were a triage team of sorts — particularly interested in the answers to question 24, which asked how often students had had thoughts of hurting themselves within the past week.

By 10:35 a.m., most of the results were in. Over the next few hours, team members pulled students who had responded “very often” or “often” out of class for private one-on-one conversations.
The overarching message to students, said Jamie Murray, a district psychologist who helped coordinate the effort, was “It’s OK to not be OK.”

While many Colorado school districts have beefed up mental health supports in recent years, Cañon City’s decision to administer a mental health screening to high school students is rare. Many district leaders are wary of soliciting such sensitive information, fearing they won’t have the tools to help students in crisis or that they’ll be liable if tragedy strikes and they weren’t able to intervene.
“When they let me know they had been working on rolling out this universal screener in the high school, that was amazing to me,” said Brian Turner, CEO of Solvista Health, a community mental health center that embeds some staff members in Cañon City schools.
“We were hearing that no district would touch it because it felt so risky,” he said. “To hear that they weren’t fazed by that … was really refreshing.”..

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2019/06/05/its-ok-to-not-be-ok-how-one-high-school-saved-lives-with-a-34-question-survey/

Reactive vs. Proactive Parenting in the Digital World with Safe Tech Committee Member Lisa Cline

MentalHealthForum_2018 by on Scribd

My name is Wil Wheaton. I Live With Chronic Depression and Generalized Anxiety. I Am Not Ashamed.

...Right now, there is a child somewhere who has the same panic attacks I had, and their parents aren’t getting them help, because they believe it reflects poorly on their parenting to have a child with mental illness.

Here’s one of the things I tell them:

One of the many delightful things about having Depression and Anxiety is occasionally and unexpectedly feeling like the whole goddamn world is a heavy lead blanket, like that thing they put on your chest at the dentist when you get x-rays, and it’s been dropped around your entire existence without your consent.

Physically, it weighs heavier on me in some places than it does in others. I feel it tugging at the corners of my eyes, and pressing down on the center of my chest. When it’s really bad, it can feel like one of those dreams where you try to move, but every step and every motion feels like you’re struggling to move through something heavy and viscous. Emotionally, it covers me completely, separating me from my motivation, my focus, and everything that brings me joy in my life.

When it drops that lead apron over us, we have to remind ourselves that one of the things Depression does, to keep itself strong and in charge, is tell us lies, like: I am the worst at everything. Nobody really likes me. I don’t deserve to be happy. This will never end. And so on and so on. We can know, in our rational minds, that this is a giant bunch of bullshit (and we can look at all these times in our lives when were WERE good at a thing, when we genuinely felt happy, when we felt awful but got through it, etc.) but in the moment, it can be a serious challenge to wait for Depression to lift the roadblock that’s keeping us from moving those facts from our rational mind to our emotional selves.

And that’s the thing about Depression: we can’t force it to go away. As I’ve said, if I could just “stop feeling sad” I WOULD. (And, also, Depression isn’t just feeling sad, right? It’s a lot of things together than can manifest themselves into something that is most easily simplified into “I feel sad.”)

So another step in our self care is to be gentle with ourselves. Depression is beating up on us already, and we don’t need to help it out. Give yourself permission to acknowledge that you’re feeling terrible (or bad, or whatever it is you are feeling), and then do a little thing, just one single thing, that you probably don’t feel like doing, and I PROMISE you it will help. Some of those things are:

• Take a shower.
• Eat a nutritious meal.
• Take a walk outside (even if it’s literally to the corner and back).
• Do something — throw a ball, play tug of war, give belly rubs — with a dog. Just about any activity with my dogs, even if it’s just a snuggle on the couch for a few minutes, helps me.
• Do five minutes of yoga stretching.
• Listen to a guided meditation and follow along as best as you can.

Finally, please trust me and know that this shitty, awful, overwhelming, terrible way you feel IS NOT FOREVER. It will get better. It always gets better. You are not alone in this fight, and you are OK...

https://medium.com/@wilw/my-name-is-wil-wheaton-i-live-with-chronic-depression-and-generalized-anxiety-i-am-not-ashamed-8f693f9c0af1

Mental Health Nonprofit Changes Name, Broadens Scope

Mental Health Nonprofit Changes Name, Broadens Scope: The Mental Health Association of Montgomery County will become EveryMind and expand its services throughout the region...

EveryMind receives funding for some of its services in the county through contracts with Montgomery County Public Schools, the county Department of Health and Human Services and also from the state’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, according to the county.