Kids' Council Studies Mental Health

The Cambridge Kids’ Council—which studies youth issues in order to make policy recommendations—announced last night that it would examine the link between students’ home and school environments and their mental health at a meeting of city officials and community members.

Karen A. Hacker, executive director of the Institute for Community Health and a professor at Harvard Medical School, presented findings from the most recent mental health surveys conducted at the city’s middle and high schools.

The results, which were broken down by race and language spoken at home, showed that Asian high school students reported feeling sad or hopeless for two or more weeks more frequently than other racial groups. They were also most likely to have considered suicide, while multiracial students were most likely to have actually attempted it.

The results also showed that Asians had the highest rate of participation in community service and the majority received grades of As and Bs.

Hacker said that the relationship between these statistics is not yet known.

“We’re in the middle of an analysis right now to understand the risk factors in the Asian population,” she told the council members.

Mary Wong, the executive director of the council, said that the report on mental health was compiled in response to a discussion that began in September 2007, when members wanted to explore whether at-risk youths were exhibiting unhealthy behavior because they lived in environments that were not supportive.

But Wong and Cambridge City Council member Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 expressed uneasiness with the way the findings were presented, proposing that the racial categories used in the survey could obscure its results.

Reeves also said that he was worried that the survey, which was conducted anonymously, did not include a way to follow up with troubled students, especially those who indicated that they had considered or attempted suicide.

Wong said that it was important to keep in mind that these results were presented in isolation.

“Mental health is not an area by itself. I can’t see how it cannot be built into the current initiatives we have,” she said.

Both Reeves and Wong noted that Cambridge may also have the unusual problem of over-supporting its students. Reeves said that students who graduate from the highly supportive atmosphere of the city’s high school often feel alienated outside the school’s support system.

“There is this syndrome,” Reeves said. “We have a number of young people, they need to be in Cambridge to thrive.”

—Staff writer Michelle L. Quach can be reached at mquach@fas.harvard.edu.