What Dayton Daily News learned after investigating youth mental health care

As part of their Mental Health Matters series, Dayton Daily News reporters Samantha Wildow and Eileen McClory recently looked at the big challenges facing young people.

In this conversation with WYSO, reporter Wildow talks about some of the research conducted for the series, in which they found a shortage of professionals available to help with those challenges.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sam Wildow: A state report on youth found that 37% of kids reported feeling sad or hopeless every day for the past two weeks, which is an indicator of suicidal ideation. Pre-pandemic, that was about 26%. About 1 in 5 kids have had at least one major depressive episode in the last year, according to the 2024 State of Mental Health in America [report] and more than half of them did not get treatment. With the ones who did get treatment, about 65% said it helped. So it was something that’s been increasing since before the pandemic. But the pandemic — when I talked to Dr. Blankenship at Dayton Children’s — she said it was like putting gasoline on a fire.

With suicide in particular, we have seen I think it’s the second leading cause of death among youth. And we’ve seen it increase about, I think, 50% over the last two decades. We’ve been looking at some of the reasons why this has been going on, as well as what are some of the ways that we can help. It’s a very big issue to tackle. So I think it can be overwhelming for some people who are trying to learn more about this crisis and then also how they can help 

Jerry Kenney: When you started your research, did you expect to find how widespread this problem was?

Wildow: I think we were already kind of aware how much youth were suffering. What was surprising to me — and I also think Eileen McClory, who also wrote the series with me, but I don’t want to speak for her — but we realized how big of a problem social media in technology is. Even if children don’t have access to social media, they can use technology that can also be harmful to them as well.

Kenney: And I know one thing you found in your research was the shortage of health care providers.

Wildow: Yeah. One of the people I talked to, she’s a teenager in Greenville, and she had to be hospitalized once, and she had to go all the way to Dayton Children’s, which would be almost an hour, I think, was the drive. And even just finding a therapist or a mental health provider locally in certain areas can be difficult, especially if you’re in a rural area. And also there’s a lot of hoops to jump through with getting referrals and then being able to find a doctor who can take them within a certain period of time. There was another parent I talked to, I think it was like three or four months after her daughter’s school first noticed that she was having problems and may have ADHD, and so they notified her and she went to her primary care doctor who gave her a referral. But then that process just took a really long time after that until she could get seen by a doctor.

Kenney: Is there anything else that you learned through this project that you’d like to relay to our listeners?

Wildow: I think there needs to continue being a culture shift when it comes to mental health. There still is very much a stigma attached to it, even though a lot of people talk about the stigma in day-to-day life. It’s difficult to talk about mental health. A lot of parents, if their child has a mental health issue, it can be difficult because they may feel responsible in some way or they may feel like they’re not a good parent and that’s not what that means with the mental health. It can be genetic, or it can be influenced by outside factors like pressures from social media, pressures from day to day life.

So that, I think, still needs to be something that needs to change. Maybe more doctors need to have mental health checks within primary care. There may be social media companies [that] need to take more responsibility for what is happening to youth. Like in Australia, they just banned people under the age of 16 from getting on social media, which may be difficult to police, but then maybe parents will pay closer attention trying to double check and make sure that their kids aren’t on some sort of social media, so they don’t get in trouble. So there’s a lot of things that can be done. It’s a very broad issue and it can seem overwhelming. But if we take it piece by piece, I think that there’s multiple factors that can be addressed and helped in some ways.