Breaking the Silence: In today’s society, many youth in the area are struggling
Published 9:10 pm Friday, April 18, 2025
The 2022 Minnesota Student Survey completed by Freeborn County students showed that over one-third of girls in eighth, ninth and 11th grades said they had ongoing mental health concerns, while fewer than 15% of boys reported the same.
From the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey (Freeborn County students)
From the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey (Freeborn County students)
From the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey (Freeborn County students)
From the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey (Freeborn County students)
Screenshot
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Editor’s note: This is the first of an ongoing series about youth mental health. The series will culminate with a Screen-Free Week for the whole community May 4-10.
Across the board, Freeborn County mental health professionals will agree that many students in the county are facing serious emotional challenges.
Whether it’s anxiety, depression, increased behaviors or other diagnoses, many youth in the area — as well as across the state and nation — are struggling.
The 2022 Minnesota Student Survey, which asks questions of fifth-, eighth-, ninth- and 11th-graders every three years in the state, found that while unhealthy behaviors like tobacco and alcohol use were down, there were “an unprecedented amount of long-term mental health, behavioral or emotional problems.”
According to the Center for Rural Policy and Development, “the data showed a continuing rise in mental health issues, especially among girls. In 2019, 35% of girls taking the survey and 18% of boys said they had been dealing with long-term mental, emotional and behavioral health issues (“long-term” meaning more than six months). In 2022, the girls’ figure had jumped to 45% while the boys’ number rose to 20%.”
Of students in eighth, ninth and 11th grades in Freeborn County who completed the same survey in 2022, the data showed that mental health challenges increased with age and were more commonly reported by female students, according to a report provided by the Freeborn County Public Health Department. By 11th grade, over one-third of girls said they had ongoing mental health concerns, while fewer than 15% of boys reported the same. More girls than boys also said they’ve received mental health care in the past year.
Among eighth-grade girls, nearly one-third said they had intentionally hurt themselves in the past year. In 11th grade, that number remained high at about one in four girls.
Boys reported lower but still concerning levels. When asked about suicide, about one in five eighth-grade girls said they had seriously considered it in the last year, with smaller percentages in older grades.
Regulating emotions
Erin Lowe, a licensed independent clinical social worker with Freeborn County Department of Human Services who provides family therapy, correlated these responses and said she has seen increased rates of anxiety among youth, and along with that, she is seeing younger children being diagnosed.
Lowe is trained to diagnose children under the age of 6, which allows her to focus on some of the youngest children in the community.
In addition to anxiety, she said local mental health professionals are seeing an increase in behaviors among adolescents they haven’t seen in prior generations, she said, noting that some of these are directly correlated to mental health.
“A lot of kiddos have traumatic experiences they’ve never worked through,” she said.
Trauma can affect people differently — while one person may experience it fine, another may display behaviors in a much different manner because that’s how the brain processes it.
She said children aren’t born understanding how to regulate their emotions. Infants cry when they need something, and as children get older, the people around them provide models and display the behaviors of how to regulate their emotions.
She said she always tells people who come into her office that while there’s nothing wrong with emotions, it’s what people do with those emotions that’s important.
“We need people to teach those skills to our younger generations by modeling, sampling … by being there to help them, guide them,” she said, noting if they don’t have those examples, they won’t know any differently. While parents want to do what’s right for their children, some were also never taught those skills themselves.
She and other mental health professionals are also seeing increases in depression and other mood disorders, likely tied to children not knowing how to process their emotions, she said.
According to the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the percentage of U.S. teens ages 12 to 17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year has increased in girls by 145% since 2010 and 161% in boys.
Suicide rates for younger adolescents have also increased substantially nationwide, with a 91% increase in boys ages 10 to 14 since 2010 and a 167% increase in girls since 2010, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the New York Times best-seller “The Anxious Generation,” said 2010 is important in these statistics because that was the year the iPhone 4 was introduced. It was the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, and with that, adolescents began spending more and more time in the virtual world.
‘It’s not reality’
Lowe agrees that social media has played a part in the mental health concerns youth face, though there are many factors that can contribute to mental health issues. She said youth have been inundated, especially in recent years, with the rise of social media and other things going on in their environments.
She described social media as a “glimpse into somebody’s world that is curated to be what somebody wants it to look like.”
“It’s not reality,” Lowe said. “Kids only see a snapshot of their peers or teens across the nation. As an individual seeing this, they think they should have their stuff together, but what they don’t realize is that was a snippet, a tiny piece of someone’s life.”
She said what youth see on social media can affect how they feel about themselves and their situation.
“It’s not a fair comparison,” she said.
In addition to what they’re watching, how long they spend on social media and devices plays an important role in their ability to thrive.
Lowe said with a finite number of hours in the day, if adolescents are choosing to spend their time on their phone when they’re not at school or not sleeping, then just by nature, they are not getting outdoors to play, they’re not meeting up with their friends or playing games with their family — all experiences that help them grow and learn.
She spoke of the value of human relationships and the importance of human interaction in thriving.
“If we’re reducing that, we’re reducing the possibility of thriving,” she said.
Lowe pointed out that it is not uncommon for people to have symptoms of a mental health diagnosis but that doesn’t necessarily mean those symptoms reach the level of a clinical diagnosis.
In those cases, she said it is still important to continue paying attention to these individuals.
“Just because it doesn’t rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis, doesn’t mean that things aren’t there,” she said.
Sheena Possin, a social worker at Albert Lea High School, said from her perspective, cellphones have been a major factor in affecting the mental health of youth.
She said as much as she thinks they can be amazing devices, she does not agree with them belonging in schools and she does not agree that children younger and younger should be getting them.
She and social worker Brittany Roberts said phones can affect sleep patterns, the ability to pay attention at school and even the ability to push through more challenging things.
Roberts said many use phones as an escape, instead of completing challenging tasks.
“(They think), I’m going to just focus on my phone … and escape the uncomfortableness of what we need to do instead of pushing forward,” she said.
Possin said some of the other contributing factors toward mental health issues are that some of the things that were taught at home in previous generations are not being taught at home for many in this generation. The school is getting asked to sometimes step in and teach some of those skills when they are missed.
The women said from their perspective, anxiety and depression are the most common mental health issues they see with students at their school, though there are some students struggling with addiction, too.
Roberts said while it is probably accurate that there are more students diagnosed now than there were 10 years ago, there are also more students who are aware of mental health and willing to talk about it.
Since students and teachers returned after the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a large push on social-emotional learning.
Possin said she is appreciative of the administration at the high school, who are understanding and aware of mental health and its impact on students and how it impacts their needs. She said there have been many times in the district when they have been asked for their opinion as a mental health professional on a student and family situation.
“It is an amazing partnership that really helps our students get the help they need,” she said.
More News
-
Construction Updates
-
-
