I was a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore when I had my first panic attack at school.
It erupted in my throat during biology class as I heaved, trying to breathe. My lungs were trying to force out air and my body was shaking constantly.
As I hyperventilated, my vision blurred and I couldn’t hold my pencil still as I tried to write down vocabulary words for the limbic system.
My teacher didn’t even ask questions, just slipped a pink slip onto my desk to go to the nurse’s office.
The nurse, however, sent me to a counselor. The next three years, I would be one of a few students at my school selected to receive psychological services for on-campus therapy.
Now, let me get this straight, I am grateful for the experiences I had with my high school therapists. There were many groundbreaking moments in my therapy sessions that helped me survive high school after being diagnosed with two mental disorders.
Hell, I managed to understand and receive my diagnosis through these sessions.
I never learned how to properly process my emotions beforehand and I had my first crying session that involved healing during one of these meetings.
However, the aspect I want to highlight is how schools incorporate these psychological services on their campuses.
To give context of what I went through, I was one of the first batch of students the school selected to try out psychological services on campus, a guinea pig of sorts.
The school tried many different services, and I went through each of them - and inevitably with every new service, things went wrong.
First off, every professional in the field of psychology will tell you that to maintain a healthy relationship, you need reliability, consistency and stability.
This is so important to have, especially with your therapist, according to a May 4, 2021 Positive Psychology article,
The process of therapy ending between a therapist and a client is known as termination, according to the same article.
Terminations need to be handled with proper and professional care to successfully and healthily detach from a patient.
In the three years I had therapy at my high school, I went through five different therapists, and not because I wanted to, but because my school kept changing services.
It was such a vulnerable, emotionally draining time of my life.
I had to reopen doors to skeletons I never wanted to talk about again and again because I knew
I had to open up about my trauma and mental health issues to heal and make progress in therapy.
The worst part was I got so attached to a couple of these therapists, and I wasn’t able to maintain therapy for long enough to gain real progress.
I would go through termination sessions at the end of every school year in the midst of finals and academic chaos.
The process of a termination session without proper time to end client and therapist connection left me with struggles of abandonment. As if I didn’t have enough issues already.
The first therapist I had wasn’t even a therapist, it was a social worker.
Social workers are trained professionals who try to help individuals, communities and families in vulnerable situations such as poverty or social inequity.
Now, I have nothing against social workers. They provide an extremely necessary service in society and allow people in a crisis to receive help and support.
However, crisis cases and offering resources to people is very different from therapy. Therapy itself is a resource to help an individual focus on their mental health.
These sessions with the social worker felt like ranting sessions at most, not necessarily gearing towards anything in particular, just venting about school, family and friends without provocation of thought.
That is no fault of the social worker, they were doing what they were trained to do: assess a situation and help guide someone through an adverse time.
Social workers are completely different from therapists, who are professionals trained and equipped to analyze and develop an individual’s mental health.
The next therapist I was assigned was through a program called Juvenile Diversion, a police program meant for juvenile offenders.
The diversion program has the tools to help provide mental health services on school campuses, however these cases are meant for juveniles courted in the juvenile justice system, according to the website.
For your information, I was never in the juvenile justice system, I was only seeking mental health services.
I sat down at a table my junior year of high school and was asked to fill out a form for the program to receive therapy.
It asked how many times I’ve been arrested, what kind of offenses I’ve committed, if I had any family members convicted of a crime and more questions along these lines.
I didn’t answer any of these questions because none of them represented my status quo.
I was seeking help and it made me feel as if to receive treatment, I needed to be criminally charged.
The therapist I was assigned to was incredible, but there was lasting damage with the process of gaining therapy. I felt guilty for wanting help from a program designed for juveniles who were labeled as criminals unfit for society.
Luckily, in these sessions I learned about boundaries and how to engage in healthy coping mechanisms that helped me get through high school.
My senior year was probably the best therapy I received in high school through a program meant to help students and public campuses receive therapy.
The therapist assigned to me had a couch in her office, stuffed animals scattered around and snacks to make you feel at home during therapy.
I had many mental breakdowns and anxiety attacks my senior year of high school, and I was always allowed to enter her office whenever I needed a comfortable place to calm myself.
Therapy is necessary for people to function, especially for high school and college students when so many stressful changes are happening in life that are out of their control.
Many people in general don’t have access to mental health services. Therapists can be incredibly expensive, it can be time consuming and overall it is difficult to find a service that suits an individual’s needs.
I was lucky enough to get some form of counseling in high school, and I finally got the proper treatment myself and so many others deserve.
When I arrived at San Jose State, I enrolled in counseling sessions at the Counseling and Psychological services on campus, and that experience has helped me grow in so many ways.
I was able to receive treatment from a counselor who identifies as LGBTQ+ and was able to open up about so many conflicts in my life.
I got to keep the same counselor for the past three years and made some significant progress in my therapy journey.
I’m not just surviving anymore, I’m putting in the effort to grow.
My anxiety attacks have been less frequent, and I’m no longer scared to show up to school anymore in fear of having an attack while in class.
Public schools should have mental health services to help better a student’s mind, and it should be implemented in a safe, ethical and nurturing way.
Students shouldn’t have to feel like criminals or juveniles in order to get the treatment they deserve. They shouldn’t have to keep constantly switching therapists to put a bandaid on an open wound.
Students should have the right to free, or at least affordable, counseling and therapy because their respective mental health is just as important as their physical health.
