Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order. Madam Speaker, tonight, I am convening a Special Order…
Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
Madam Speaker, tonight, I am convening a Special Order hour for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and we are focused on the urgent matter of our children's mental health, which is in crisis.
Madam Speaker, I want everyone listening to me now to think about their childhood.
What stressors, if any, did you experience?
What kept you up at night?
What made your heart skip a beat or your palms sweaty?
What seemed completely overwhelming?
Now think of who was there to help you, listen to you, and comfort you.
Now imagine that stressor, and imagine dealing with that same issue in a time when the worldwide pandemic forced you to remain at home for more than 1 year before you returned to school with constantly fluctuating COVID policies; in a world where the book you read last year is banned in school now; in a world where you spend a significant amount of time on social media consuming stories and pictures of other peoples' lives, and that includes coming across lies and disinformation; in a world where a former President wanted to build a wall, where death is ubiquitous, and where food, gas, and housing prices are so high you often go without the basic necessities; in a world where the Supreme Court has stripped basic human rights that your parents and grandparents were able to enjoy.
Could you imagine being a child right now and juggling your mental health?
Mental health is essential for overall health, and ignoring that basic fact is harmful to our children who are counting on us to do everything in our power to support them during this difficult time.
This pandemic has exacerbated many preexisting challenges, stressors, and trauma experienced by our youth.
It has also caused many new challenges.
In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory highlighting the urgent need to address the Nation's youth mental health crisis.
Last fall, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children's Hospital Association jointly declared a national state of emergency in children's mental health.
Prior to coming to Congress, I had the privilege of serving New York City children in our public schools for over 20 years. I served as an elementary school teacher, a high school guidance counselor, and a middle school principal.
The education, care, and well-being of our children are my life's work, and it is an honor to speak on the floor tonight to highlight an urgent issue that is critical to the health and safety of our children and the future of our democracy: our children's mental health.
During the 2017-2018 school year, 34 children died within the K-12 school system in the Bronx, and 17 died via suicide. In early 2018, the horrible Parkland High School shooting happened, killing 17 children and wounding 17 more while leaving a nation reeling in despair.
During this time as a middle school principal, I saw a rise in student self-harm and suicidal ideation in kids as young as 11 years old. It was these factors that ultimately led me to run for Congress in the first place.
Since the pandemic, an unprecedented number of our young people feel helpless and hopeless right now, and we need to make an unprecedented effort for a coordinated, comprehensive response. That is why at the end of last year we called for a new COVID relief package that considers the needs of the whole child to support overall health, including youth mental health.
The toll of the pandemic is daunting when we consider its impact on children. In the past 2 years, more than 167,000 children across the country have lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID-19. These caregivers provided a child's most important basic needs: love, security, food, and shelter. More than 13,000 of these children lost their only caregiver. In fact, for every four COVID-19 deaths, one child in the U.S. loses a parent.
A student in my district in Yonkers shared her experience of suddenly losing her father to COVID followed by her mother testing positive. She described her fear and not being able to sleep while her mother was in an induced coma for 9 days. She couldn't eat, and she couldn't go to school. Because of her father's immigration status, he was excluded from almost all types of medical insurance and was forced to choose between basic healthcare and food.
Her story is not the only one like this, which is why we need to drive resources so that schools can directly support students' mental health and so we can break down barriers to basic, necessary healthcare for all regardless of immigration status.
After experiencing the major traumatic loss of a parent, we know the world as these children knew it has ended. Loss and grief are a part of life, but in children grieving, a major loss can have lifelong impacts of depression, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety.
For parents and those of us who work directly with children, it is heartbreaking to see one child grieving. With this vast number of grieving children, our entire community must be ready to empathize and mobilize the help they need to cope.
In addition to the stress youth are under as a result of COVID-19 and this ongoing pandemic, they are also facing other mental health issues as they navigate puberty and being an adolescent. Youth across the country are battling substance abuse, eating and body image disorders, facing various forms of peer pressure, anxiety, and overall trying to learn how to manage their emotions and feelings during their formative years. This is a reality across racial and economic lines.
Still, meaningful mental health care is out of reach for so many children. Native American or Indigenous children are 4\1/2\ times as likely as White children to have lost a parent to COVID. Black children are almost 2\1/2\ times more likely than White children, and Hispanic children are nearly twice as likely than White children to have lost a parent or caregiver.
When we also consider that many families who face job losses, loss of insurance, financial hardships, and a lack of school-based mental health professionals, the barriers to youth mental health support are unacceptable.
Madam Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from New Jersey (Mrs. Watson Coleman).
Madam Speaker, I thank Mrs. Watson Coleman for her leadership and her voice in this important matter.
Madam Speaker, I want to talk briefly before yielding to Representative Carter from New Orleans. I want to speak briefly about the role of schools in addressing the issue of mental health.
Our schools play an essential role in supporting positive mental health for our youth. In order to serve the whole child, we cannot limit our Federal support to only academic outcomes. Children are much more likely to receive mental health services in the school than anywhere else, but the problem is that too few of our schools have enough mental health professionals on staff, including psychologists, social workers, and counselors. The ratio of students to school psychologists is roughly 1400 to 1.
Just this year I hosted a town hall with students in my district who shared how hard it was for them to meet with a counselor or mental health professional at school. The students with more access to mental health resources went to schools in wealthier parts of my district.
As a former principal, I know firsthand how important it is that the schools have the resources to employ mental health professionals. More than 14 million students attend a school with police officers or school resource officers, but no counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers on staff.
The way we allocate resources is a reflection of our priorities and our values, which is why I support unprecedented levels of funding that prioritizes the mental health of all our students by making sure there are trained, culturally competent mental health professionals in every public school, including more Black and Brown mental health professionals.
For the last 2\1/2\ years, we have seen our schools at the front lines of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, we as a society have shifted how we think about what it means to care for our young people in the face of multiple public health crises.
Together, with our schools leading the way, we worked to create a safety net for our children and prioritize the well-being of the whole child. These are the kinds of investments that can buffer children from chronic stress that can lead to adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
It should go without saying, our kids are so much more than any one test score or academic measure. Children are individuals who are members of their community, and our schools should be subsequently funded and equipped as community hubs. Supporting our children's success is fundamentally intertwined with supporting the whole child in a well-coordinated ecosystem of wraparound services.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Carter).
Madam Speaker, I thank Representative Carter so much for his powerful words and leadership and for being here this evening.
When we consider the toll of a nationwide youth mental health crisis, our mission must be to show love to our youth and to help our young people learn to love themselves, their communities, and our planet.
In the face of so many real-world challenges, like the climate crisis, the pandemic, and extreme inequality and discrimination, it is essential that children's learning prioritizes creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration as these approaches all support the mental health and the overall development of our children. These are the 21st century learning skills that will empower and teach our students how to think, not what to think.
When the purpose of education is about fostering the value and ethic of lifelong learning as a fundamental pillar of democracy, it is abundantly clear that promoting positive mental health is fundamental to that work.
But when we try to apply a business model to our schools and treat our students as commodities, making the necessary investments in mental health support and social and emotional learning gets sidelined in favor of a more simplistic bottom line that improperly fixates on the results of an annual assessment.
We have subjected our public schools to this model for 20 years, and it hasn't addressed inequity in our schools. It has not closed any gaps. What it has done is limit what gets taught and how it gets taught.
It has prioritized doing well academically over developing the lifelong skills that you need, including your emotional health and well-being. It has made students feel that their chance to live a quality life with opportunities hinges on how they do on a singular exam.
We have the opportunity to change this, finally, and do right by our students. The idea that our schools should be equipped to meet the holistic needs of their students is not one that should exist only in a time of a pandemic. We cannot go back to our old ways of thinking about schools just in terms of narrowly defined academic performance.
Even before the pandemic, rates of young people experiencing mental health issues were rising. Between 2007 and 2019, the percentage of adolescents reporting a major depressive episode increased by nearly 60 percent. By 2019, mental health disorders had exceeded physical conditions as the most common cause of impairments and limitations amongst children.
I saw the gaps in our health system up close. Schools are the most common place for children to access mental health services, but most schools do not meet recommended ratios for school psychologists, social workers, or counselors. Instead, even before the pandemic, we saw pediatricians, teachers, school leaders, and more stepping in to try to provide mental health services, despite many of them not feeling fully equipped to do so. The pandemic only exacerbated all of these issues and put further strain on a health system that was already not built to adequately support youth mental health.
As COVID surged, emergency room visits for young people having a mental health crisis increased dramatically. Since 2019, ER visits for suspected suicide attempts rose 51 percent amongst girls ages 12 to 17. But high COVID hospitalization rates and, later, the surge of new variants, combined with inadequate vaccination rates, mean that we had and continue to have a shortage of hospital beds and emergency rooms to service young people having a mental health crisis.
In an op-ed by a constituent of mine, Jonathan Slater, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, described children and teenagers at his hospital having to wait 3 to 4 days for an inpatient bed.
The strain on hospital capacity caused by the ongoing pandemic means our ability to adequately treat all other physical and mental health is jeopardized. The more people get vaccinated and boosted, that means fewer people in the hospital, and it means the 15-year-old who lost her parent to COVID and hasn't experienced a normal school year since she was 12 can get access to the emergency mental health care that she needs.
I want to express immense gratitude for the many people, teachers, school leaders, pediatricians, school bus drivers, emergency room physicians, and staff who have stepped in to confront the youth mental health crisis head-on. But we cannot address youth mental health without addressing issues we face in our broader healthcare system and without addressing workforce issues in mental health professions.
As we continue to face compounding public health and mental health crises among our young people, we have to recognize that cultivating a better Nation, marked by healthy and happy young people who are equipped to engage critically and collaboratively with their communities and our democracy, requires us to continue on the path of rethinking schools and their purpose and potential.
We need Federal investments and resources in our schools that reflect these priorities, and that means putting the mental health and well- being of our students front and center as we move forward.
Madam Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Tlaib), and I thank her very much for being here.
Madam Speaker, I thank Rashida for her voice. It is good to see her and be with her.
Tonight, we have heard from Members who represent communities across the country. The youth mental health crisis is a national crisis that requires an all-of-government response. Our children deserve nothing less.
There were so many voices that contributed to these remarks this evening from my district, New York-16. I recognize them at this moment.
Making the necessary investments in our youth mental health will take all of us at every level of government and in every community.
I give a special shout-out to constituents of mine who shared their priorities around youth mental health. Jonathan Lewis, a Scarsdale Village trustee, shared how important it is to understand the relationship between a mental health crisis and learned outcomes to our students, not just in an academic sense but also with respect to school climate and the importance of creating a learning environment that is safe from violence.
Stephanie Marquesano from the harris project in Ardsley highlighted how important it is that communities, youth, and all levels of government be in dialogue with each other about the intersection of mental health and substance use disorders, particularly as it relates to our youth.
Ron Hartridge, educator and advocate in the Bronx, expressed his deep concern regarding the impact that trauma and fear have on our children and how important it is to equip our schools to support students instead of prioritizing compliant behavior, which is so often used to justify and perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline.
Jonathan Alvarez from 914United in Yonkers called for meaningful juvenile justice reform in the Lower Hudson Valley.
Darryl Taylor, a Tuckahoe Village trustee, wrote in about the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly on our youth who lost loved ones, parents, siblings, or friends, and the urgency we must have to reach out to our youth who may be feeling alone in their grief and hopelessness.
Mary Graves, Mount Vernon's Democratic chair, shared how important it is that we make mental health resources and support available to the whole community and consider how there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health.
Julie Cordin from my district shared how troubling it is to learn that suicidal ideation and attempted suicides amongst children increased during the pandemic and that this will not go away on its own. We have to work on this together. I am so grateful to all of my constituents who care so deeply about our youth, both locally and nationally.
The youth mental health crisis is a national crisis that requires an all-of-government response. Our children deserve nothing less.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.