Grand Junction, CO: Trauma training for teachers as student have more anxiety and depression

Nov 1, 2017, Grand Junction (CO) Daily Sentinel: Depression common for county’s teens http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/articles/depression-common-for-countys-teens/ 40 percent felt sad, hopeless, a rate 3 times national average… The 2017 Children’s Health Report is a compilation of six national, state and local studies on the health of children and teenagers in Mesa County. Data about emotional well-being, which was collected from 652 Mesa County teenagers for the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado survey, showed that 40 percent of teenagers felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more. Those symptoms are also known as a major depressive episode, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A 2015 NIMH study showed that 12.5 percent of teenagers in the United States experienced a major depressive episode over a 12-month period…. “It really speaks to what we have already known,” Ebel said. “We are trying to figure out what, in general, this generation of kids are going through. There is so much research around what social media and technology are doing in terms of making our kids pretty psychologically fragile. We know our kids have been struggling.” District 51 is currently implementing trauma training for administrators, staff and teachers in response to an increase in depression and anxiety among students, Ebel said. …