It’s 10 o’clock at night and a Braintree student is found taking a stroll down a darkened neighborhood street. The blue glow of an LED light appears by their hand before vapor puffs above and over their head, trailing behind them. This is just one student’s method of relieving stress and anxiety stemming from the never-ending exams and presentations.
“I kind of always knew that I would end up indulging in smoking activities,” explained an anonymous student. “I always used to imitate it growing up. I was kind of surrounded by it from peers around me.”
High school can create many opportunities for stress, anxiety, and other mental health struggles. Everyone has different ways of coping with it; some strategies are healthier than others.
“Right around when I hit eighth grade, I started developing really bad anxiety issues, which only pushed my mindset further into smoking activities. Then when I tried it for the first time, I kind of just never looked back.”
Adults in Braintree want to know these things. They ask the question: how do kids deal with stress and anxiety? Many hope they don’t receive this type of answer, though.
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey that Braintree High students take every other year is distributed by the Braintree Community Partnership, yet many Braintree teens do not know what this association really is or what they do.
Stormy Leung, the Substance Use Prevention Coordinator of Braintree, said, “The partnership started when a bunch of parents from the Braintree community were losing their children to substance use disorder, mainly to an overdose on painkillers, fentanyl, and opioids.”
The “children” she refers to could be anywhere from 15 years old to 30 years old.
“A lot of parents wanted to do something about it, because they were losing their kids and they didn’t want any other family to kind of experience the same pain.”
This called for the creation of the Braintree Community Partnership.
“Our mission is to reduce substance use in town amongst both adults and youth, and our second part of our mission is to support individuals and families that have been impacted by substance use disorder.”
The partnership provides resources for those on the path to recovery, looking for rehab, or grieving a loss due to substance use. The BCP website even has a section especially for adolescent services.
The anonymous students said that they didn’t know about these BCP resources, but all Braintree High students know about the survey.
“The survey is for us statisticians, like public health professionals and scientists, to understand what the trends are in youth. The reason why we do that is so that we can have better policies, better initiatives, better programs, and better health curriculum for our students,” said Leung.
“If students participate in the survey and answer honestly, data can be collected to identify these areas of need. From there we can put supports in place to address the identified areas of need,” said Braintree High guidance counselor, Ms. Smyth.
When the survey finds certain trends among the youth in the community, it can help the community know what mental health and well-being campaigns to implement into education at our schools. This can help spread awareness among students regarding dangerous risk taking behaviors and prevent them from occurring, or serve as early intervention to prevent them from persisting. When it comes to intervention or helping students through tough times, the Partnership also teams up with school guidance counselors.
“Students can talk to a guidance counselor, and they’ll see if this is an appropriate service to refer them to,” said Leung in reference to the Cartwheel program that the Partnership helps provide to grades K-12. This program provides virtual mental health services to students who need it, but it is not the only resource that can be provided.
“In an effort to help and support youth, the BCP offers a prevention program for youth who have engaged in or are at risk of risky behaviors,” explained Smyth. “We have the ability to partner with the BCP which allows for them to come into the building to offer and run this program to students.”
“It’s kind of like a support group for high schoolers that are struggling, whether it’s bad grades or they’re using, or they have family members that are using and they just don’t know how to cope with it,” said Leung.
This program is not currently running, but has in the past.
Even when they run the risk of getting caught, some students continue to make decisions that the Partnership would discourage. The anonymous student was asked if they would utilize the provided resources.
“Not personally. I mean, for kids who really want to completely stop drug use, I think it could be a good way for them to stop, but not everybody wants to stop it.”
