GREEN BAY — Brown County has awarded the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Green Bay a $100,000 grant to establish a new mental health counselor position, which will provide youth and families with additional therapy options.
Unlike many other avenues of therapy, this one is free.
This isn’t the first time the Green Bay club has prioritized mental health in its community mission. It was one of the first Boys & Girls Clubs in the United States to incorporate a social and emotional learning department in 2017, said department director Brooke Unrath.
“Accessibility (for mental health) is always an issue, and we try to help by having a resource in the clubhouse for kids who are already there,” Unrath said. “That way, parents don’t have to take time off work to care for their children.”
Being a young person is especially difficult these days, and it can be hard to find support. Some families do not have health insurance or do not have insurance that adequately covers therapy. Other families, pressed by professional obligations, do not have the time to provide their children with the care they need. And others languish on endless waiting lists to speak to a professional, only to learn that the therapist may not be the right partner for their child’s needs.
But new funds from the federal pandemic relief fund are coming to local organizations, including the Boys & Girls Club, to break down some of those barriers.
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Brown County gave the club the money from its American Rescue Plan Act funding, but the need for a mental health counselor came long before the grant, Unrath said. Prior to the pandemic, the Greater Green Bay Club had partnered with the Foundations organization to provide its young members with the care they needed.
The pandemic forced the club to close for a time and when it reopened, Unrath said, the youngsters had undergone a troubling transformation. The Boys & Girls Club needed more than a partnership. He needed more core staff to meet the new needs of young people.
It was already common for Unrath to work with children who had incarcerated parents and transient children or were moving from one foster home to another – but these issues and the resulting mental health issues have amplified during the pandemic.
“I now see higher suicidal ideation in children at a much higher rate than ever before,” Unrath said.
As More Young People Die by Suicide in Wisconsin, Barrier-Free Solutions Are Needed
If other Boys and Girls Clubs in the area are any indication, the integration of a mental health counselor into the Greater Green Bay Club will allow children, youth and families to seek “solutions-based” care. while they are on waiting lists for longer term care. , said Lisa Kogan-Praska, Executive Director.
The people most often not receiving care, whether short or long term, are young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, as well as children of all ages, according to the 2019 Wisconsin Behavioral Health Systems Gap report. Researchers speculate that some of the causes are the result of a lack of advice, stigma and prejudice, cost barriers, a lack of support options and insurance issues.
Even before the pandemic, a crisis was mounting. Statistics from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services revealed that in 2018, the last full reporting period, 54 people under the age of 20 died by suicide.
Ten years prior in 2008, for context, those same age groups in Wisconsin had 31 suicide deaths. This number has continued to increase.
It can’t be said enough, Unrath and Kogan-Praska agreed, that the pandemic has made a bad thing much, much worse.
Small things produce big emotions in young people, Kogan-Praska said. Two years of distance learning has suddenly taken people from real-time socializing as a high school freshman to now a senior with the social skills of a sophomore. Along the way, they’ve missed events like junior proms, homecomings, and all the vicissitudes of classroom antics.
“They missed key and essential elements for their own development and socialization,” Kogan-Praska said. “They need help to understand and deal with all this grief.”
The mental health counselor will work on both the east and west sides of the Green Bay club on an extracurricular basis, Unrath said, similarly to the rest of the social-emotional learning team. It provides that the counselor will have a workload of 10 to 15 people in addition to the group work with the children.
Kogan-Praska said the free service isn’t a magic bullet, but it can start conversations that lead to long-term care. Data from neighboring Fox Valley Boys and Girls Clubs suggests that over time, his approach can connect children in need — and some parents — with professional and experienced counselors.
The Fox Valley organization grew from a counseling center to a chartered club in 1998. Today, it has two counselors in addition to case managers and specialists who work with runaways or transient youth.
Carlyn Andrew, senior director of counseling and training at Boys & Girls Clubs of Fox Valley, said on average, children and young adults who work with on-site counselors do so for six to eight months and experience average 10 sessions.
Young people’s development, Andrew said, depends on a number of factors: academic success, good character and citizenship, and a healthy lifestyle. A programmatic approach to enriching these three factors is the name of the game for Boys and Girls Clubs, Andrew said.
Research now demonstrates that social-emotional development has as much to do with healthy outcomes as nutrition and risk-avoidance behaviors, Andrew said.
“The more skilled young people are, the more prepared they are to deal with the stressors and adversities that will come their way,” Andrew said.
Results from on-site mental health counselors at Boys and Girls Clubs of Fox Valley revealed a reduction in symptoms in 95% of clients receiving counseling services.
Kogan-Praska said grants for his Green Bay club’s mental health programs are “scratching the surface” in conversations about future permanent mental health models.
“I would love to see us being able to scale this in a sustainable way if we could,” Kogan-Praska said. “Because I think the needs are definitely there on a much higher level than a single role can support.”
Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for USA TODAY NETWORK-CENTRAL WISCONSIN. She welcomes story tips and comments. You can reach her at [email protected] or check out her Twitter profile at @natalie_eilbert. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text “Hopeline” to the National Crisis Text Line at 741-741.
