To Improve Their Mental Health, Young People Take the Reins

“I knew it was going to be different when they brought out the cameras,” said Pita Moi Moi III, a senior at Garfield High School in Seattle. “That’s when I realized, ‘This is real. I’m getting listened to.’”

Pita and his classmates don’t always feel listened to. Last June, Amarr Murphy-Paine, a junior at Garfield, was shot and killed in front of the school. The media rushed to cover the tragedy, but many students thought the picture they painted was inaccurate and incomplete. Most stories shared the same basic message, Pita said: “Another kid shot, like always.” Amarr, they worried, had been turned into a caricature.

“They don’t really understand what it’s like to be a community like us,” said Mason Bennett, a junior. “They don’t really want to look at us.” Pita, Mason, and several other Garfield students decided that, if they couldn’t rely on others to tell a story that rang true, they’d do it themselves: They started making a documentary film, True Dawgs.

In one sense, True Dawgs is, as senior Joseph Hefa called it, “a form of protest.” But it’s also a journey of healing. The students are shoring up each other’s mental health through the trauma they’ve experienced, they’re building strong relationships with adults who care about them, and they’re helping members of the extended Garfield community rediscover hope. “People can see a headline and not really pay attention,” said Clay Stauffer, a junior. “We wanted to humanize our community and share the emotional weight we feel.”

At Pivotal, where we’ve been supporting adolescent mental health solutions for eight years, we believe the project is also an illustration of an important principle: Nobody is more qualified than adolescents to say what adolescents need. The current mental health care system was designed by adults for adults, and it hasn’t worked well for youth. We partner with organizations that have big ideas about how to reinvent that system, and one of the most important of those ideas is listening to young people and letting them lead.

Building with students, not for them

While True Dawgs is a project by students about students, it’s also the product of a collaboration with a group of adults they’ve recruited to support their vision. The idea for the film emerged during a conversation with Dr. Ben Danielson and Brenda Majercin, directors of AHSHAY, a Seattle nonprofit and Pivotal partner focused on ending youth incarceration.

Brenda and Dr. Ben approach their work from two angles. They believe they must “unbuild the fortifications of youth incarceration” and also “build up the fortifiers of hope.” Their conviction that hope lies at the center of young people’s well-being led them to Garfield. After the shooting, they wanted to help create a space where the students could heal and cultivate a sense of joy and meaning. With help from Jamie Rees, a Garfield graduate and now a teacher, they convened a group of young people and planned to provide media training to help them influence the coverage of their community. Over time, though, the young people took the project in a different direction.

“When we went to talk to the grown-ups,” said Mason, the Garfield junior, “they had emotions. They actually were with us.” Their vulnerability allowed the students to trust them enough to tell AHSHAY that what they really wanted was to make a documentary. AHSHAY was all for it. “The youth have solutions,” said Brenda. “They’ve been living it.”

Dr. Ben and Brenda have learned that youth leadership thrives on this kind of intergenerational collaboration. It’s easy to have a simplistic idea of what youth leadership is, Dr. Ben said—to believe that it’s about adults always following young people’s lead. “I sometimes carried idealized visions of youth voice and how it is just youth on the top of the mountain with the tablets.” But really, he continued, young people want trusted relationships with caring adults. With that kind of nonjudgmental support, young people realize there are “times when they can choose guidance and times when they can choose to be the voice.”

Reaching students where they are

The word “school” is too narrow to describe everything that happens inside a high school building. It’s so much more than classes. It’s where young people build strong relationships with adults. And when they’re struggling, it’s where they should be able to get the care they need. In fact, according to one study, students are six times more likely to complete mental health treatment when it’s delivered at school.

At the same time, many schools simply don’t have the resources to provide effective mental health care. Only 48% of public schools report that they can effectively provide mental health services to all students who need them. And the funding crunch is only getting worse. Earlier this month, the federal government eliminated $1 billion in school-based mental health grants.

So what does effective school-based mental health care look like? Pivotal partners The Jed Foundation (JED) and Forefront Suicide Prevention are working in schools across Washington State to find out, and they are starting by listening^{*JED and Forefront are not currently working at Garfield, which offers a range of mental health services for students through other partner organizations.}.

Both JED and Forefront have spent years identifying best practices for school-based mental health care, but they’ve also learned that what works best differs for each school and student. So wherever they work, they convene the entire community, including administrators, teachers, parents, and local leaders, to find out what they need. JED and Forefront put students themselves front and center, with detailed surveys of the entire student body and a youth committee that’s feeding into the entire process.

Based on this research, the resources available in each community, and what students and the adults in their lives say they need, each school gets a comprehensive, customized strategic plan. Some schools have increased outreach to students, parents, and caregivers. Others have written crisis plans, or offered suicide prevention programs. And there’s one simple strategy that can be powerful at a time young people report increased feelings of loneliness: dedicated time during lunch period for students to connect with each other.

“Our version and our story”

The Garfield filmmakers have spent the past year alongside local director Brooke Montgomery, doing everything from conducting interviews to reviewing footage to pitching potential producers. Pita just interviewed Amarr’s father, Aaron Murphy-Paine, whom he regards as an uncle. “It was just a uncle-nephew talk … and the community he grew up in and how he feels about the way his son died,” said Pita. “It was sad in moments, and it was funny in moments, too.”

When the film is done, they hope to stream True Dawgs on a major platform such as HBO Max, Netflix, or Prime Video. It’s easy to dismiss that ambition as too big, but the students are resilient, and they’ve beaten the odds before. “What I learned about myself is that I have been through a lot at a very young age,” senior Jada Jones said. “But I also realized that I’m strong. Half of the adults can’t do the things that we’re doing now.”

“As a project we are fighting against gun violence,” explained Princess Green, a junior, “but we’re also saying we’re here as a Garfield community, as the Central District, and there are good things that come out of here.”

Many others had told the students what their experience means. “This,” said Princess, “is our version and our story.”