There is a mental health crisis in North Carolina. The percentage of young people diagnosed with anxiety and depression more than doubled since 2016. In 2023, about 4 in 10 North Carolina high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness to the point that it disrupted their normal day-to-day life for two weeks or more at a time. This data only scratches the surface. At NC Child, we’re working to learn more about the causes of these challenges and what solutions we can implement to ensure that every child in North Carolina can grow up and reach their full potential.
Our schools are where children spend the majority of their days, learning to read and write, make friends, and build social connections. Our schools play another vital role for children and communities: they provide services. Schools are a source of meals during the day and places to be active. Schools also provide support staff to meet the needs of the whole child.
Research shows that students with healthier behaviors tend to have higher grades in school, and this means that ensuring the health and well-being of our students is supported when they’re in school is critical to their overall success.
Too many students in North Carolina do not have access to school-based services or opportunities that positively impact their health. Now that we are experiencing a crisis of youth mental health, access to school-based services has never been more important for ensuring that our children grow up to lead healthy, fulfilling lives.
The Mental Health Mapping Dashboard gives advocates an inside look at what resources are available to students in school districts across the state. It also gives us a roadmap to where and how we can expand access to school-based mental health resources so we can improve outcomes for our state’s young people and set them up for a lifetime of success.
You can learn more about the Jason Flatt Act to prevent youth suicide through the Jason Foundation.
School mental health professionals and the child mental health crisis
2025 North Carolina Child Health Report Card. Special focus on school-based mental health
Across the state, there are far too few counselors to meet the mental and behavioral health needs of students. The ECU’s Healthier Lives at School and Beyond is a school-based telehealth program serves the students, staff, and faculty of medically underserved communities in rural eastern North Carolina.
Children’s mental health is connected to the health of families and community. School mental health professionals work in partnership with parents and health care providers to surround children with the support they need.
Mental health care is an important component of good health care. It’s important that children and their families have access to qualified professionals when they need them.
North Carolina’s youth and children are in crisis, with suicide now the leading cause of death among youth ages 10-14 in our state. One in five North Carolina high school students seriously considering attempting suicide in 2021, up from 16% in 2017. One in ten reported actually making an attempt. In 2020, an unprecedented 67 children (ages 0-18) died by suicide in North Carolina.
More than one in 10 children ages 3 to 17 in North Carolina had a diagnosis of depression or anxiety in 2020 – an increase of 49% since 2016. These numbers are a wake-up call for adults to make sure we put the resources in place to meet our kids’ health needs – and that includes mental health.
Long before COVID and school closures, we saw alarming trends in measures of young people’s mental health. For instance, the number of North Carolina high schoolers who said they felt good about themselves fell from 80% in 2011 to 60% in 2019 (the year before the pandemic) and fell again to 49% in 2021.
The American Academy of Pediatrics declared a “National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health” in October 2021.
School is one of the most important places where we can support children’s mental health. We need to meet kids where they are – and they are at school every day. That means putting more funding into school nurses, counselors, and social workers and other trained adults who know how to help kids in crisis and can work alongside parents to provide support.
The state legislature made a great start by passing youth suicide prevention training and protocols for schools in 2020 and investing in school psychologists in the last budget. Now we need to continue building on these investments to put the staffing in place to meet kids’ needs.
