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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

At their breaking point

At their breaking point

We don’t usually consider middle school to be a breeding ground for mental health problems, but that could easily be because we’ve all blocked it out.

St. Mary’s College, the sister school to Notre Dame, performed a first-of-its-kind study evaluating the mental health of middle school girls.

The study found girls lag significantly behind boys. More than one-third of the Indiana girls between sixth and 10th grade feel sad and/or hopeless.

In eighth grade, one-fifth of the girls have seriously considered suicide, and 11.5 percent have attempted to take their own lives.

But mental health problems don’t end with girls.

The Mental Health Center of America Greater Indianapolis fielded 110 calls from young men and women ages 10 to 19 who mentioned having thoughts of suicide. This number continues to rise.

Clearly, we have a problem.

Given that a large percentage of the people who participated in the study and made the calls were in middle school, there is an indicator young people are starting to reach out for help.

The fact that girls are taking the brunt of the damage is hardly surprising. In the name of gender equality, girls’ mentalities and development are treated like boys’.

What most don’t realize is that young girls interact viciously with each other.

Women are biologically prone to see each other as competition — throw in some hormones and a few awkward growth spurts and you’ve got a veritable molotov cocktail of mental instability.

The fact that 42 percent of the calls fielded from the suicide hot line are from boys only indicates that the problem goes beyond girls.

One quick week of sex education and a few golden rule lectures so guidance counselors can pat themselves on the back and say the problem is fixed are grossly insufficient.

Mental health is something that must be addressed at a young age. The alternative is dealing with the crime, depression and unhappiness that manifest from unaddressed mental health problems.

In Indiana, a lack of awareness is putting our middle-schoolers in danger.

Kids need to be educated and guided through the beginning stages of puberty. It’s the time when they are most emotionally vulnerable and left to their own devices that they could seriously injure themselves.

If we begin to confront mental health issues at the start, we can solve major cultural issues. We can save lives.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
Follow the Opinion Desk on Twitter @ids_opinion.

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