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Economy takes toll on San Mateo County teens
By Daniel Powell
San Mateo County Times
Worrying about the economy isn't just for adults anymore.
As the national and state economic outlook continues to darken in the face of rising unemployment, foreclosures and slash-and-burn budgetary cuts, teenagers are increasingly picking up the spillover stress at home, area school counselors and psychologists say.
Adolescent Counseling Services, a nonprofit that provides free on-campus counseling at local middle-and high schools — two in San Mateo County and six in Santa Clara County — recently reported seeing a 58.8 percent increase in the number of middle school children seeking mental health counseling, compared with the same time period last year.
At three middle schools in Palo Alto — Terman, Jordan and JL Stanford — ACS counselors had met with 250 students in the first three months of 2009, compared with 147 last year during the same time period, said Margaret Murchan, program director of the service's on-campus counseling program.
"We're getting a flood of kids," Murchan said. "Several of the kids are saying they are worried about finances. They have big ears and sometimes they can also feel what's going on with their parents, so it's a little hard to shield them."
Confronted with parental fears of layoffs, foreclosures and worries about how to pay for college, many teenagers will start to show signs of stress with lower grades, trouble sleeping and acting out in class, Murchan said.
"Stress plays out in different ways in different teens, but we do know that stress can lead to internalization," said Dr. Stephen Hingram, chairman of the psychology department at UC Berkeley. "It can lead to thoughts like, 'What did I do wrong? Am I partly to blame because our house was foreclosed on?' "
Hingram said internalizing conflicts can lead to depression, anxiety and more serious behaviors such as cutting classes, drug abuse or even suicide. In some cases stress can be externalized, leading to aggression and thoughts of persecution.
The problems have not been limited to students coming from low-income households, Murchan said. "It really hits across the board. The middle class and lower class are both pretty affected."
"We are full. We have three interns and we are full. Our numbers are up," said Katie Luce, an ACS counselor who meets with students at both Redwood High and Terman Middle School.
Many of the teens who attend Redwood High, a continuation school designed to help students behind in their education graduate, are already dealing with issues normally reserved for adults. Students attend classes for three hours a day, leaving time for work or job-training programs. Twenty toddlers and babies spend their days at the school's in-house child care center for student mothers.
"What I've been noticing is the stress levels are higher as far as dealing with basic needs like food and clothing," said Luce, who spends much of her days talking students through conflicts they are experiencing at home. "If the dad lost his job and there's four kids and no money to pay the bills, and one of the kids breaks something, then everyone explodes."
But as increasing numbers of high school and middle school students seek out or are referred for mental health counseling, budgetary cuts at state and local levels could reduce the amount of trained professionals available to counsel them.
It's unclear at the moment how San Mateo County school psychologists would be affected district by district, but the Manteca Unified School District in San Joaquin County recently issued provisionary pink slips to nine of the 24 psychologists currently employed there, and the district is a place that Doug Siembieda, president of the California Association of School Psychologists, fears could be a bellwether for the rest of the state.
"I'm afraid to say it out loud," Siembieda said. "Because I'm afraid it's going to be a lot. My expectation is that you're going to see a lot of school psychologists receive reduction-in-force notices."
The association is holding its annual convention this week in Riverside, where Siembieda said a special workshop was planned to help school psychologists come up with contingency plans for lowered staffing caused by budget shortfalls.
Adolescent Counseling Services has been working on a contingency plan of its own. Dr. Philippe Rey, the organization's executive director, said that while his organization's finances should be fine through the end of the fiscal year, he was working on several models from "worst case" to "realistic" in preparation of uncertain economic times ahead.
"We haven't heard anything yet," Rey said. "No news is good news, but I'm bracing for a worst-case scenario."
Melissa Ambrose, a special services counselor at Oceana High School in Pacifica, is currently earning a master's degree in social work, and is working on a thesis on how to best serve the mental health needs of teenagers in a public school setting.
In interviews with the special services counselors at the other Jefferson Union High School District campuses, Ambrose said the No. 1 issue kids were talking about with four of the five district counselors was poverty.
"The scariest thing for all of us is: As the effects of the economy continue to trickle down, is this going to get worse?" Ambrose said.
She said the Jefferson Union High district wasn't currently planning on cutting any of its mental health staff, "but if it gets bad enough, at some point we're going to get cut."
"One thing we forget is how resilient (kids) are, how able to rise above the intolerable and rise above misery," Ambrose said. "And the more mental health services they have, the better they do and the more resilient they become. It is very rare to see a kid totally fall apart."
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