Kansas teenagers are struggling with a years-long, upward trend in mental health issues and risk of suicide, a survey of nearly 71,000 of the state’s students found.
Officials administering the Kansas Communities That Care Survey shared several striking results from the annual survey, a de facto snapshot of Kansas students’ well-being and safety, with the Kansas State Board of Education on Tuesday.
The survey, which began in 1995 as a project funded by the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services and administered by the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Center, has tracked risk behaviors like drug and alcohol use, bullying and mental health among the state’s pre-teens and teenagers.
While not all Kansas students took the survey, about 50% of the state’s sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders took the survey in districts that opted in. More personalized survey results are also made available to districts to identify and address any local issues in their communities.
Since the survey began asking students about depression and suicide in 2016, the number of students reporting feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose to more than 22,000 in 2021. That figure, 38% of respondents, is about two in five Kansas pre-teens and teenagers.
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While that figure has increased by an average of 2.5 percentage points each year since the survey starting asking the question, the figure also saw a 5% point increase between 2020 and 2021, reflecting a school year in which many students were isolated at home in remote learning.
Rachel Phillips, project manager at Greenbush, said she was unsure how much of the recent upward trend in reports of depression are coming from changes in students’ circumstances compared to a general increase in awareness and acceptance of depression in society.
“Perhaps depression is increasing, or perhaps it’s that kids are getting better at identifying these emotions and are reporting with more frequency,” Phillips said. “I can’t interpret that and speak to the why, but I think it’s a valid point and maybe something to take into consideration when we talk about the context. What are we talking about in schools? There was a time when that conversation was really taboo.”
Risk of suicide remains high
The number of students reporting having ever in their lives thought about killing themselves rose slightly to 29.6% in the 2021 edition of the survey, up from 28.7% in 2020.
About 8.3% of students surveyed reported having seriously thought about killing themselves in the past month, while an additional 9.4% reported having those thoughts in the past year.
Compared to more than 10,000 students who had seriously thought about killing themselves in the past year and the more than 6,700 students who made a plan about how they would do it, more than 2,600 students reporting having actually tried to kill themselves during the past year.
As a percentage, the number of students reporting having tried to kill themselves in the 2021 survey fell to 1.5% from 1.8% in 2020. Students who reported having ever attempted suicide fell by half a percentage point to 10.1%.
The trends of reported depression and suicidality have skewed toward girls, with about two in three students reporting those kinds of thoughts coming from students who identify as female.
Phillips said that split in gender was interesting particularly because the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s data shows somewhat the opposite — typically, 72% of deaths by suicide come from men. However, KDHE hasn’t yet published data on deaths in 2020.
In contrast, age wasn’t a substantially significant factor in students reporting suicide attempts on the survey. At the older end, about 150 18-year-olds reported having attempted suicide, compared to just under 300 11-year-olds. In the middle-teenage range, more than 450 15-year-olds, or about freshman-aged students, reported suicide attempts.
Phillips said the survey data is critical for school communities looking to act now and prevent any attempts from happening in the first place.
“While this information is quite sobering, it’s really critical to realize that these conversations with kids are important to have in discussing healthy ways to manage those thoughts,” Phillips said.
While in-school bullying trends down, cyber bullying rises
Bullying in school trended down to about 22% in the 2021 survey data, although it wasn’t immediately clear how much remote learning might have affected the prevalence of that issue.
In contrast, cyberbullying reports sharply rose to about one in four students, passing regular bullying for the first time since the survey began asking about it in 2017.
Girls made up about three in five of students reporting bullying at school or online. Two percent of students reported experiencing bullying every day.
Additionally, the survey found that increasing amounts of students are intervening whenever they do see bullying happen, either reporting it to teachers or doing something to stop it themselves.
About 40% of students said adults at their schools do something to stop bullying and solve the problem when it is reported to them, compared to 9.5% of students who said their schools’ adults do nothing when bullying is reported.
Fewer students reported missing school because they felt unsafe, uncomfortable or nervous while at school or on their way to school.
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The changes in bullying figures come after state education commissioner Randy Watson in 2019 assembled a Blue Ribbon Task Force to analyze how Kansas schools can better prevent and address bullying in their buildings.
That task force in December returned to the state board of education with recommendations such as better state support and direction for local anti-bullying measures and policies, as well as an increased focus on compliance with anti-bullying statutes and policies as part of the state department’s accreditation process for districts.
Especially with the striking number of students experiencing feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts, state board of education member Jim McNiece said he wanted KSDE staff to move more urgently on mental health and bullying prevention efforts.
“This is not something that, ‘Well, in five years, we’ll be better,’” McNiece said. “There are kids out there right now who are in jeopardy, and we need to do something about them. Is this plan going to do something about that, or are we going to wait for a (Kansas Education Systems Accreditation) report a year from now? I don’t want to wait.”
Substance use generally down among Kansas teenagers
Alcohol, vaping and marijuana use continue to be among schools’ most pressing concerns, with about 10.9% of students reporting having drank alcohol sometime in the 30 days prior to taking the survey.
But even though substance use has been steadily decreasing among students since the survey was first administered, the percentages of students reporting substance use or alcohol consumption steeply fell to record lows in 2020, especially when students may have been learning remotely without easy access to peers distributing substances at schools.
Alcohol use fell to 10.9% in the 2021 edition of the survey compared to 15.8% the prior year, alongside marijuana use that decreased to 4.1% from 6.8%.
“We see a steady decline in the reported use of alcohol,” Phillips said. “That number this year, at just over 10%, might be something to celebrate for our friends in prevention work who remember the days when that number was about 40% of kids.”
Still, 15.9% of students said it would be very easy for them to obtain alcohol. About 28.5% of students said they didn’t think they’d be caught by their guardians if they drank alcohol without permission, and 19.5% of students said their families didn’t have clear rules about alcohol and drug use.
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Vaping, the prominent school health issue before COVID-19, continues as problem area
Vaping use similarly decreased to 6.9% compared to 9.8% of students who had reported using e-cigarettes the year prior (while essentially the same, the survey changed its wording on the question for the 2021 survey). A relatively new issue, e-cigarette use among Kansas students was first tracked by the survey in 2017, with usage more than doubling from 5.4% that year to 12.6% just two years later.
Mark Thompson, health and physical education program consultant at KSDE who also oversees the department’s vaping task force, said that anecdotally, Kansas schools have reported seeing fewer students vaping, but among the few that do, an increased use of the products.
Success in cutting down use this past year could have come from students’ decreased access to substances through their peers at school. Ads against e-cigarette products on such social media platforms as TikTok could also be helping to cut down on vaping, Thompson said.
But for many of Kansas’ rural school districts, the challenge in addressing vaping comes from a lack of staffing and expertise to tamp down on the issue, especially when larger districts might have the human capital to hire dedicated staff to address substance use.
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One effort to address that is a free, online training program that will start next year in 20 pilot schools across the state as part of a collaboration between the Kansas Health Institute and the University of Kansas Medical Center.
The vaping task force had hoped the Kansas Legislature would pass its version of the federal “Tobacco 21” law, which in 2019 raised the federal minimum age to buy tobacco products to 21. Although several Kansas cities and counties have already enacted their own versions of the federal law, the state Legislature failed to pass a statewide version during this year’s legislative session.
In any case, Thompson said he’s received assurances from legislators that the law will be passed during the 2022 session, especially since Kansas risks losing federal funds tied to the national Tobacco 21 legislation.
Thompson said other pending federal policies, such as a proposed Food and Drug Administration ban on menthol flavors in cigarettes and cigars but not yet e-cigarettes, could be good first steps to address what had been U.S. schools’ most significant health issue prior to COVID-19.
Shortly before the start of the pandemic’s effect on the U.S., KDHE switched to a new smoking cessation program called My Life, My Quit that also offers services targeted at helping children quit smoking. Across 1,300 children in 16 states enrolled in the program, 47% reported a 30-day abstinence from all tobacco products within three months of starting the anonymous, online cessation counseling.
“We know a big proportion of youth who have used a vape have also tried to quit,” said Jordan Roberts, KDHE youth prevention program manager, “so I think we really need to increase awareness of this program and let young people know it’s available to them.”