Brian Hagberg
WARREN, Pa. – Getting people to open up about their mental health challenges and issues is never easy, especially with adolescents.
Renowned youth mental health expert Jeff Yalden spent a little more than an hour Thursday night at the Warren Area High School auditorium helping the school community learn both how to help reduce mental health issues and ways to speak with students about mental health. Yalden was brought in as the school copes with the loss of two students and a teacher to suicide during this academic year.
“It shouldn’t take this for us to know what our kids are going through,” Yalden said. “We need to normalize the conversation. We need to get comfortable being uncomfortable talking about our feelings. And I find the kids already want to, it’s the parents that don’t. It’s the adults that are uncomfortable with it.”
See Yalden’s full community address (four parts) here:
What he’s found through talking with students is that they feel their parents don’t validate their concerns, or that the child doesn’t want to be a burden to their parents.
“They don’t want to disappoint you,” Yalden said. “They don’t want to share with you what they’re going through because they know what you’re going through, and they feel if they share what they’re going through now that’s going to be on top of what you’re going through. They don’t want to burden you because they know what you already have on your plate. And to the child, they serve as a liability.”
The Warren County YMCA and CORE (Choosing Openness Regarding Experiences) partnered together to bring Yalden to WAHS.
“I think the community was ready to have something to try to figure out, I think there’s a lot of questions still,” CORE founder Kari Swanson said. “And Jeff has been great in saying ‘We’re not going to have those answers, but we need to figure out how to move forward and to start to heal.'”
Before addressing the community Thursday night, Yalden spent nearly 12 hours talking with staff and students at WAHS. He arrived at 7 a.m. and didn’t finish speaking with students until after 6 p.m.
“We had several people say, you know, we wrapped kids around with services after the suicides, we wrapped them with supports in Warren, and he was able to get stuff out of them that we weren’t able to do in wrapping services,” Swanson said. “I think they like the fact that he’s here and gone. And he’s not in their stuff. And they could relate to him. And he disclosed a lot. He was raw, he was real. And he said it like it is and I think they respected that.”
“Honestly, you could have heard a pin drop in here for two hours for those kids today which I’ve I’ve never seen an auditorium like that,” Warren County School District Superintendent Amy Stewart said. “I mean, they really responded very well to him. It’s exactly what they needed.”
Yalden added that his general message to the students was to use their intellect, not emotion, to make decisions.
“I said to the kids, remember the ‘I’ over the ‘E,’ never the ‘E’ over the ‘I,'” Yalden said. “Intellect over emotion, never emotion over intellect. Don’t react on emotion. I don’t think people want to die, I think they want to find a solution to their problems in the here and now. Suicide is the most preventable form of death. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
One thing Yalden tried to impress upon the community was the way kids will often see themselves. They see themselves not necessarily as they are, but as who they think their parents/the community wants them to be.
“I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am,” he said. “I am who I think you think I am.”
Yalden stressed that it was his choice to spend the full day at WAHS and not travel to other schools around the county.
“I didn’t want to be anything less for your community because I felt what your community is going through, it needed to be about Warren,” Yalden said. “The other schools can choose to do something. This was all about you and your kids, and I made that decision.”
The materials Yalden used will be made available to the district as resources to use with other schools. Stewart said a team would be working to get flyers, posters and other materials out as soon as possible.
“(WAHS students) needed a safe place,” Stewart said. “I mean, they’ve experienced unprecedented loss here in their school community. And it isn’t that we don’t find that there are their trauma issues in the other schools because there are and they do need help and support in other ways. But this was the most urgent, the one most important right now. And this program was very prescriptive to what this student body and what this teaching staff needed.”
Yalden is the founder of The Jeff Yalden Foundation, Inc. a 501(c)(3) that brings awareness and suicide prevention to school communities in a crisis situation. More information about Yalden and his foundation can be found here.
