Published Apr. 7, 2022
BY ALEXIS PINE
AIM Youth Mental Health, a nonprofit organization that prioritizes research on youth wellness, is spreading the passion for awareness through Ideas Lab, a new program where Monterey County high school students take data from surveys completed by classmates to propose recommendations to local administrators about how to address the recent mental health crisis.
Providing a platform revolving around youth mental health and development research, students receive hands-on experience in the gathering and analysis of data, which will be proposed to community leaders at the AIM Scientific Symposium on April 29 at Carmel’s Sunset Center.
“That’s the whole point of Youth Participatory Action Research,” director of program development Tricia Wiltshire says. “It’s not just about doing research, it’s about taking a look at your results and then advocating for change. It’s important that we as adults listen to teens.”
The anonymous five-minute surveys ask high school students what struggles they have experienced among their friends and within themselves, such as whether a friend has confided in them before about their struggles or if there’s a need to see changes in their schools.
“Most students have struggled with mental health, and I’ve definitely faced the pressures of school,” says sophomore Kaitlyn Myrick, an AIM volunteer. “Many students have to take mental health days. We want to figure out ways to encourage students to seek help and talk about their issues and make them more common.”
(graphic by 2019 AIM ad contest winner CEORA MINOR-ARREDONDO
The research proposed goes toward assisting the Youth Advisory Group, affiliated with Stanford University’s Allcove Centers, which provide access to various mental health services and are located across California. Assessing the wellbeing of adolescents in Monterey County helps determine the need to implement a local center. The program also fosters peer-to-peer relationships with data that allows students to be more honest with the anonymous aspects of the survey and enables the process to be more effective among volunteers.
“When you have a set period of time in your math class to take a survey that’s asking you these personal questions, people aren’t going to take it seriously,” sophomore Quinn Weisenfeld says. “But if a friend asks you to take it after school, you feel more comfortable.”
At the symposium, volunteers at the research program apply to present their data and recommendations to a panel of professionals, the end goal for those conducting the research project. From there, four or five applicants will be chosen to further their research in order to make suggestions to local schools.
“It’s a real problem because a lot of us are young, and we should not have to deal with these problems,” sophomore Gia Panetta says. “It gets in the way of our learning, family relationships and overall disrupts the lives of so many young people.”
With the possibility of introducing more resources to students, either through Carmel High School’s administration or Allcove Centers, suggestions that emerge from the project aim to lighten the loads of students across Monterey County through youth empowerment.
“AIM supports research into youth mental health, and it made sense to bring in a program where the youth were doing research,” Wiltshire says, “so they can make recommendations to us.”
