Children’s mental health often gets neglected in all the talk about mental health challenges faced by adults. October 6-12 is Mental Health Awareness Week, and local experts are offering tips for parents who are concerned that their children may have mental health problems.

Several organizations in our community offer mental health services for children. Copper Shores Community Health Foundation is focusing on young people suffering from trauma due to sexual assault.

“This is a priority population for us,” says Brian Rendel, program director of counseling and wellness at the foundation. “Trauma is something that can impact kids’ mental health. Resilience enables many kids to survive challenging experiences, but some experiences–like sexual trauma–can disrupt development. Therapy can help kids recover from traumatic experiences, so they can get back to the business of figuring out life. The sooner a young person gets treatment for trauma, the better their healing.”

However, Rendel is concerned that trauma can be a misleading term. “While serious experiences can be traumatic for some children, the term ‘trauma’ is a bit over-used. So are other terms like, ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression,'” he says. “Our culture now permits talk about mental health challenges. More schools are incorporating mental health education. A drawback can be confusion about which mental health challenges are suitable for formal treatment and which ones are ordinary parts of being human.”

Rendel adds: “We need to be careful to teach kids that most people feel sadness and worry at times, and there are healthy ways to manage those feelings when they happen. Many of these experiences are not illnesses requiring a diagnosis and treatment. Rather, what is needed is a supportive caregiver who acknowledges the child’s emotions without trying to make the child feel better. It is normal to not feel good sometimes. Kids need to know they are normal for feeling emotions. When we swoop in and try to make negative emotions disappear by giving them medicine, sending them to a therapist or giving a clinical label to their feelings, the impact can feel alarming to a child and inadvertently send them a message that something is wrong with them, when in fact their emotions may be within a normal range of life.”

Rendel is also concerned about what he calls “fake food” in children’s diets. “This impacts kids’ mental health in so many preventable ways,” he says.

“I would like to see diets consisting of more real food like our grandparents and those before them used to eat.” He would like to see people regularly eat plant-based foods with little or no processing.

“Our brain is simply an organ in our body subject to the foods we eat. If we eat well, our brain will work better,” he says.

Prevention is an important part of supporting young people’s mental health. Copper Shores also runs several prevention programs that help children and teens learn and practice mental health support skills.

Other Mental Health Services

Children and families can also get help from Copper Country Community Mental Health (CCCMH), a government-funded mental health agency serving Medicaid and Medicare clients.

Children face many mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and ADHD, says Jeff Williams, outpatient director at CCCMH.  Other challenges that children face are bullying in school and the constant pressure of social media, he says.

CCCMH offers therapy services and medication management. They also sponsor Youth Peer Support, a peer-delivered service for youth and young adults. It supports youth and young adults with serious emotional disturbance and serious mental illness through shared activities and interventions.

A parent support partner program is run by trained parents who have first-hand experience navigating child-serving agencies and raising a child with mental health or developmental challenges. Parent support partners help families to increase their confidence and competence in parenting skills, their knowledge about navigating systems and partnering with service providers. “It empowers the parent to develop sustainable, natural support networks after formal service delivery has ended,” Williams explains.

CCCMH offers many other services for children, including acute services for youth requiring a psychiatric inpatient setting; an individualized and holistic, youth-guided and family-driven planning process, and help for parents with their infants and toddlers.

They also provide crisis support, home-based therapy, autism services and referrals to other programs in the community.

“One great thing that both parents and teachers can do to address mental health issues in children is to become more informed about mental health and have discussions with youth if they suspect mental health issues are arising,” Williams says. “In fact, having discussions about mental health with kids on a regular basis is helpful even someone is not having a problem. as it may help to strengthen their resiliency in the face of adversity.”

Unite Mental Health and Wellness, a private non-profit in Houghton, also provides services for children with mild to moderate mental health problems. They recently received a collaborative grant of $50,000 from Copper Shores and $18.561 from the Superior Health Foundation to fund a new infant mental health project.

Zachary Meston, a social worker and certified infant/family specialist, is developing the infant mental health services program. It will focus on infants to children up to six years old. 

There are also many individual therapists in the Houghton area who work with children. A list of them can be found at https://www.cccmh.org/additional-mental-health-providers.