With prom and graduation season upon us, many teenagers may be feeling pressure, and in some cases, serious stress.
Last month, the Trump administration moved to cut $1 billion in school mental health grants that would have gone toward helping schools hire more mental health professionals. Despite the move from the federal government, low and no-cost mental health resources remain across South Florida.
" If anyone has Medicaid or if they have a lower income, there are nonprofit mental health facilities out there," said Justin Johansen, a licensed marriage-family therapist and the co-owner of the private therapy group Broward Therapists in Plantation.
Johansen recently spoke with WLRN about those resources, and some nonmental health-specific outlets for South Florida teenagers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Would doctors agree that this time of year can be particularly mentally taxing or stressful for young people?
If you think about the stress that accompanies these things, you know, graduation is a big transition. The prom can lead into future graduation and these monumental events, which [can lead to] so much comparison. So it definitely can trigger a lot of angst, a lot of panic.
And if kids think about it, if they have this family distance, who do these kids turn to? We hope they have a healthy peer group, [but] not everybody does. So I would think most folks in the mental health world would say it can be a tough time for teens.
Therapy can be costly and unaffordable for many families. So what kinds of resources might be available in South Florida that take away that barrier?
If anyone has Medicaid or if they have a lower income, there are nonprofit mental health facilities out there. There's something called a Broward Connections book, and this lists all the mental health services in Broward County.
Very few of them are for-profit services. So nonprofit[s] such as Henderson [Behavioral Health] and Banyan [Health Systems] is a nonprofit in Miami-Dade. So that's something to look out for if money is an issue.
Outside of mental health-specific resources, what kinds of healthy things can teens turn to if they start to feel stress or particularly bogged down mentally?
So one of the biggest struggles is bullying.
Bullying leads to loneliness and feeling like you have nobody. So healthy connections that teens have, they're going to model those healthy connections. It will also develop a sense of secure relationships so the team can rely on these secure relationships to deal with all of these life transitions. If those emotional needs are not met by a healthy relationship, they're gonna get met by an unhealthy relationship.
[The National Alliance on Mental Illness] or NAMI [is] all over Dade, Palm Beach, Broward. They have support groups, family mentors, peer mentors for teens, family wellness support groups. They have peer wellness support groups.
Another resource is churches. A lot of us at Broward Therapists, we're faith-based, and churches are known for having what they call teen life groups, where it's essentially three to five teens getting together to do what they say is "doing life together," and you hang out, have a good influence on each other.
The third thing that we would recommend for this kind of loneliness epidemic, is [that because] there is a big overfocus on self at the moment in our generation, we have seen life-changing results if the teens and parents — ideally, they do it together — can get themselves to focus on helping others.
This is what we found in Dade-County: There's something called Dynasty basketball, and that is in Miami. It's a nonprofit youth basketball program where young people can get together, focus on basketball. In Miami, there's something called Guitars Over Guns, which is another support group for teams where they all get together with the focus being guitar. We found YMU, which is something called Young Musicians Unite.
[There's also] animal shelters and food shelters. Helping others alone has such a benefit to depression, to isolation. Anything you guys can do to be of service to others, if you experiment with it, you're going to find that a lot of that loneliness will have some changes.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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