The 340,000 students who attend the United State’s third largest school district, Chicago Public School (CPS), have shown a 44% increase in mental health issues since the pandemic (Davis et al.). On top of the already existing stressors of being a high school student with classes, work, and clubs, students are faced with high crime rates in the city and similar problems that come with living in Chicago. In fact, 76.5% of students come from low-income households (Davis et al.). Overall, students who attend a CPS school are struggling with mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
With this growing rate of mental and behavioral symptoms experienced in young students, in March 2022 the CPS board of education added a new policy: five allowed mental health days for the school year. According to the Chicago news source, Chalkbeat Chicago, the policy was implented as apart of a approach to mental health and suicide prevention. Students' reaction to this legislation has largely been positive. For instance, students appreciate that the policy has decreased the stigma around mental health, gives them something to look forward to, and has pushed parents to recognize the significance of mental health days. Even more, other states have been pushing for mental health days for students and even workplaces are adopting paid time-off mental health days for their employees.
Although mental health days and breaks from school are undeniably important for students, more work must be done to target the deeper issues of the rising mental health issues seen in students. Mental health days should be implemented in schools in addition to other resources or interventions.
The upregulation of positive emotions known as savoring may be a potential strategy to help CPS students mitigate the symptoms of depression. Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago, Dr. Rebecca Silton, in her talk presented on her paper, Regulating Positive Emotions: Implications for Promoting Well-Being in Individuals With Depression, discusses the neural correlate of savoring. Serving to regulate emotions in the current moment, savoring is defined as “to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experience in one’s life” (Silton et al.). For example, counting blessings or sharing with others. Savoring-based regulatory strategies involve three temporal domains to enhance past, present, and future positive emotions: anticipating, savoring the moment and reminiscing. Dr. Silton and colleagues looked at savoring methodically using a savorings belief inventory (SBI) for beliefs about capacity to savor and a questionnaire for moods and anxiety taken by Loyola college students. The main finding demonstrated that positive affectivity was positively associated with all three domains of savoring and positive affectivity was negatively associated with depression.
Overall, Dr. Silton establishes that for individuals with high positive affectivity, savoring the moment may alleviate symptoms of depression and this could be a strategy and resource learned by CPS students dealing with mental health issues in combination with other targets to help students, like mental health days.
References:
Davis, M., Heffernan, M., Smith, T., Bendelow, Anne., Bhatti P., Macy, M., Cicchetti, C. Youth Mental Health in Chicago During the COVID-19 Pandemic. March 2021. https://www.luriechildrens.org/globalassets/voices-of-child-health-in-chicago/chicago-youth-mental-health-during-covid_voices-of-child-health-report_march-2021_final.pdf
Hendrickson, N. Chicago students welcome new law allowing them up to 5 mental health days. Chalkbeat Chicago. July 2022. https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2022/7/25/23277895/chicago-public-school-mental-health-days-law-pandemic-violence/
Silton, R. L., Kahrilas, I. J., Skymba, H. V., Smith, J., Bryant, F. B., & Heller, W. (2020). Regulating positive emotions: Implications for promoting well-being in individuals with depression. Emotion, 20(1), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000675
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