by Becca Shaw Glaser February 22, 2022, The Free Press
In early January I crawled out of Omicron isolation and headed over to Thomaston where Rebecca Roveto was crafting homemade pizza for us to eat while I interviewed her about the emotional well-being of young people in midcoast Maine. The U.S. Surgeon General had just issued a warning that “the challenges today’s generation of young people face are unprecedented and uniquely hard to navigate. And the effect these challenges have had on their mental health is devastating…in 2019, one in three high school students and half of female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009.” He also reported that the pandemic had added to the crisis—emergency room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent girls were 51% higher in early 2021 than in early 2019, and 4% higher for adolescent boys.
Rebecca Roveto has been working in a supportive role with youth for decades, whether in a middle school in California as clinical lead for Special Education and clinician for therapeutic classes, or in her current work as a contractor with The Landing Place, a program of the Knox County Homeless Coalition, providing low-barrier, free therapy to area youth. Shortly after we spoke, she became the newest member of the RSU13 School Board. Rebecca has a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology, is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in both Maine and California, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Counseling Psychology.
I plied her with questions about the current emotional health of local youth, local trans and gender non-binary youth, working with trauma, and gathered some emotional health tips for all of us. The views expressed here are her own, and should not be seen as those of KCHC or the RSU13 School Board.
Becca: What are you seeing as far as emotional health needs locally right now?
Rebecca: Mental health needs have gone up exponentially. The demand is higher, and the level of agitation in the community is very high; tempers are short. There are no adolescent therapists, and it is very difficult to get in to see a psychiatrist for meds. And the other side is that insurance companies don’t do a great job of reimbursing at good rates so it’s hard to make a living as a mental health therapist right now.
Becca: How about the emotional health of young people?
Rebecca: A huge piece of conversation on the table these days is the mental health of young people in this country, and what’s happened as a result of COVID. I would argue that what happened wasn’t that COVID made something happen, but that COVID exposed something that was already hugely problematic. We have mass shootings in schools on a regular basis, and in addition, the uptick of the use of technology, and the demands that are put on young people in different curriculums like No Child Left Behind make it difficult to teach to an individual standardization in schools. There’s also social media, which is huge. And then you put COVID in there, and COVID’s like, “I’m just gonna blow this up!” The other thing is, turns out, we don’t have any way to take care of our children if they’re not in school, which also points a lot to what schools are really for.
The biggest throughline of all of that is an experience of isolation that young people have in today’s world that I don’t think they had even 30 years ago—whether that’s because their face is in a screen, or because they’re not understood or seen, or whether it’s a sense of climate change and not knowing what’s going to be here for them in 30 years—there is a profound feeling of isolation.
The interesting thing is, on a small scale, the level of resiliency that I’m seeing in my office is amazing. Also the degree of interest in social justice and community—the young people I see are fired up. I can have a client who’s experiencing severe depression, and they also simultaneously are ready to take on the good fight, if you will—they just need to be seen and, like, heard.
Becca: What helps?
Rebecca: I think connection is key to how we decrease trauma, how we heal from trauma, how we maintain a democratic system of engagement, civically, and personally. And the way that you create connection, in my opinion, is you help people see each other as humans. So that’s a lot of my work. And part of the work that I do with young people is I become the person who sees them. I get to show up, totally, on behalf of this person, and I love that they’re not my kids. I’m a firm believer that young people need adults in their lives who are not their parents to show up for them. When I think about working with young people, it’s like, modeling compassion, authentic compassion. You’re authentic and contained and boundaried; boundaries are incredibly loving, you know?
What supports resiliency are adults who can provide containment for young people. And that looks like, in an uncertain time, adults are able to identify and acknowledge that it is uncertain—that in and of itself becomes a stabilizing force. When young people are getting regular mental health support, they are thriving because mental health care really makes a difference right now. That’s the thing is, like, people are super agitated, there’s a super high need, people are experiencing a lot of symptomatology, more than we’ve ever seen, but the flip side is that when people can get support, it seems to be really helpful in ways that I almost haven’t seen before, especially with young people. And young people seem to have a relationship to the need for mental health support in ways that most older generations just don’t.
Becca: What are some differences you see in midcoast Maine versus other places you have been supporting youth in?
Rebecca: When it comes to crisis management it is very stretched everywhere, but particularly in rural locations. There literally is not a place for people to go and people will end up in the ER for days on end. That’s particularly true for young people, because there’s even fewer beds and inpatient programs available for youth under 18. And you can’t put people who are over 18 with people who are under 18. I don’t know how many inpatient programs there are in Maine, but I think there’s maybe three or four for people under the age of 18. The other thing that I would say is especially bad in Maine is DHHS (Maine Department of Health and Human Services). It’s probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen.
Becca: What do schools need to know about supporting the emotional well-being of youth?
Rebecca: What I’ve seen contribute to the detriment of mental health for young people in schools has been a rigidity around curriculum, a rigidity around institutional and industrial models of education. When standardization goes up, mental health needs seem to go up. One place where I see a huge need is advocacy work on behalf of students to be able to get different kinds of accommodations around their mental health diagnosis. Most people in school settings are wanting to support youth, but they don’t know what they’re seeing. Part of the problem right now is that being in school is not that different than being in a crisis unit, especially when it comes to mental health. So they just see behaviors that are problematic, because they’re also having to work under the agenda of standardization. So my job is I get to go in and translate mental health to school settings and say, “Well, this behavior is happening, because, one, this is what’s happening outside of school.” So, rule number one: behavior is communication. That’s the first thing we talk about anytime we talk in a school setting. Schools are trying through the increase of mental health professionals in school settings. The more funding that’s available to provide low-barrier therapy, especially in this community, the better.
Becca: You’ve mentioned to me that many youth in midcoast Maine are exploring gender.
Rebecca: Generally, gender identity is up in the conversation—it’s up for adults, it’s up for young people, it’s part of the discourse we’re unpacking, culturally and socially. In rural New England, there are very distinct rules, rules of self sufficiency, individuality, not making waves, which can cause a lot of friction in families; it can cause a lot of confusion. And in relation to trans identity for young people in the midcoast region, there is a lot of trying to navigate and be seen and heard, whether that’s in school, the broader community, [or] a family setting. The level of suicidality amongst trans youth is higher than in any other demographic of youth (and trans people in general). What trans youth experience, and this is certainly true in a rural place such as Midcoast Maine, is the devastation of attempting to step into an identity, trying to get accepted. You’re just constantly up against it, and it’s tiring. And we know that chronic stress causes trauma. When you’re a 17-year-old, it’s not a choice. You’re like, I have to do this. If it were a choice that people could make, that made sense, they wouldn’t come out.
Becca: Are things getting better for the trans and gender non-binary youth that you’re seeing?
Rebecca: It depends on where you are in the state, because it matters so much what the school is doing.
Becca: What can schools do to be supportive?
Rebecca: Gender neutral bathrooms. Also language: non-binary language in classrooms looks like, instead of, “You guys,” or “You girls,” you say, “Okay, everyone”; “Good morning, student body”; “Welcome to school, scholars.” And one of the things that’s most devastating for trans youth is being deadnamed [calling a transgendered or gender non-binary person by a birth certificate name they no longer go by]. So, having a policy of “We call students by their <start italics>names<end italics>, not by their dead names.” And, also just education [for everyone in the school community].
Becca: With 16% of children in Knox County living in poverty—1,109 children (according to a 2020 report by the Maine Children’s Alliance), poverty is a major factor for local youth. You’ve mentioned to me previously that poverty causes trauma. Can you explain more about that?
Rebecca: Being poor is an incredibly stressful experience, and living in chronic stress causes all kinds of health problems. People are shunned, and shamed for poverty, and the other thing that’s very stressful about poverty is, it’s <start italics>very<end italics> difficult to get out of poverty so you’re constantly living in an extreme state of stress. And for kids, not only are they living with psychological stress, they might be having physiological stress due to malnutrition, the lights aren’t staying on, maybe they’re cold so they’re not sleeping, being able to get transportation to and from places like school, maybe they’re not able to have proper clothing. You are not sure if you’re going to be in the same house from month to month, and you have to move into a hotel because your parents couldn’t get Section 8—that sense of lack of safety creates a chronic fight-or-flight state. And then you end up with a chronic trauma state. And statistically, the poorest people in this country are women of color who are single mothers, and followed secondly by single mothers who are white. So women experience the highest rates of poverty. And they also experience the burden of childcare.
Becca: What are some methods for working with trauma that you use in your work?
Rebecca: The first thing is we bring it into the room, but we don’t bring it into the room as, “You have to tell your whole story over and over so that you’re re-traumatized.” My job as a professional is to be able to read when somebody is going too far into it, and to stop them. And I do a lot of grounding exercises: I have my clients put their feet on the ground, and have them look around and tell me five things from their five senses to orient themselves to the room. You can use it anywhere and it brings you back into the moment. I have them tell me the date. When they start to feel a panic attack, even if we’re not together, they say, “Today is January 8, 2022. I’m in this place, in this town, at this time. I’m looking around and here’s what I see.” You say that out loud, no matter where you are. And then of course, belly breathing–bringing breaths all the way into the belly; you can’t have a sympathetic nervous response of hyperventilating when you’re also practicing the parasympathetic nervous system response of deep breathing. So you’re basically overriding panic with deep breathing because what happens in a trauma response is your thinking brain goes offline, because it’s all limbic, it’s all survival.
Becca: For folks who are unbelievably tired, a relentless exhaustion I and many others are experiencing, do you have tips on how to find more restfulness, balance?
Rebecca: Specific things that come to mind: one, comparison kills. When you find yourself comparing yourself, either to yourself pre-pandemic, or to somebody else in your community, that is a great opportunity to engage in some self-compassion talk. The one thing we all have in common right now is we all are living through a global pandemic. It’s not going to look the same for everybody how they’re doing it, their kids aren’t gonna look the same, their lives aren’t gonna look the same, relationships aren’t gonna look the same. I think it’s also really important to come back into the moment. In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, there’s this practice called radical acceptance, and when we’re engaged in radical acceptance of the pandemic, part of that also means being present in the moment. I think that one of the things that’s causing us a lot of harm right now is that we’re trying to be somewhere where we aren’t. “I wish I was where I was before; I wish I was ahead of this.” It’s a huge moment of, like, spiritual reckoning on control and perfectionism. Something I think about is, <start italics>I’m alive in historical times<end italics>. And has anybody been alive for a historical thing where they’re like, “Wow, you know, that really, incredibly good, easy time was so historical”? Also, it is entirely reasonable to take a break [from the news, following politics, social justice activism, etc.]. It’ll all be here when you come back. And not everybody’s taking a break at the same time, right? It’s how you keep going through a crisis.
Becca Shaw Glaser is author of the essay “Activism, Suicide and Survival: Healing the Unhealable,” and co-author/editor of “Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out.”