Crisis. Fatalistic. Overwhelming.

That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.

They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.

One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.

Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.

These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.

“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”

What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?

Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.

“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”

Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.

“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.

But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.

“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”

Changing the Narrative

Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.

Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.

“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”

View From a School District

Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.

Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.

“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”

Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.

It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.

While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.

“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”

It was announced by sweeping statements.

When the New York City Public Schools chancellor, David Banks, caused the largest district in the country to change how it taught students to read last year, it was with a sense of alarm. Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in third through eighth grades couldn’t read proficiently, which Banks blamed on the city embracing a “fundamentally flawed” approach to reading instruction. Per reporting from The New York Times, he told parents: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.” Reforming, Banks said, was “the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

The sentiment wasn’t isolated to New York, with almost all states having passed some legislation in the last few years to correct course on how reading is taught. These changes, called a “decisive victory” in the long-standing “reading wars,” have pitted education research favoring phonics-based instruction against other ways of teaching students to read, including word recognition. In the wake of the shift, a prominent curriculum group dissolved and the educational publisher Heinemann reportedly experienced sagging curriculum sales. Meanwhile, students still struggle to read.

But these recent education scraps in reading have also caused fresh uneasiness, as some observers begin hunting for the next education reform effort to go bust — perhaps in math next time.

There’s an unvoiced assumption behind this — that education is prone to “fads.” So where does this perception come from? And is it accurate?

The Reform Merry-Go-Round

Fad is the wrong word, says Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who writes a blog about school reforms.

For Cuban, reform movements appear to be caught in a loop, attempting similar changes “again and again.” But it’s not that schools are constantly being burned by the latest craze. It’s that they’re suffering from deep structural problems, and they seem not to learn from the long history of school reforms.

The lesson? Public schools are particularly vulnerable to pressure, Cuban said on a call with EdSurge. That’s because national problems tend to become school ones, Cuban says. Schools have to walk a “tightrope,” striking a balance that is both stable for students and able to adapt to changes in the broader society, he says.

Pressure on schools to respond to new issues often ends up altering curricula or introducing new courses, because that’s the easiest part of the public education system to change, Cuban argues. But classrooms are isolated from the superintendent’s office, the school board and other “policy elites” who push change, he says.

For example, he adds, when it became known that teenage driving was causing road deaths, driving became part of public school curricula. When drugs became a national concern, schools added anti-drug curricula. “When the nation has a cold, schools sneeze,” Cuban says, adding that it’s an old cliche that turns out to be true.

That focus — the classroom, where abstract ideas about school meet real students — is a common sticking point, according to other observers as well.

It's not that specific reform ideas are fads, argues James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's that schools seem susceptible to fads because people don't understand what it means to take an idea seriously, he says.

In reality, many ideas out there haven’t been properly tried out, because that would mean focusing largely on how they are put into practice in classrooms, he adds. There are probably a lot of ideas out there that are effective, he says — but nobody knows what they are.

To Ronald Gallimore, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates believe they are on the cusp of something that will really work this time, he says. But they may not be aware of the history of instruction. It also doesn’t help that the U.S. has a highly decentralized school system, with schools being locally controlled, making it hard to make uniform sweeping changes to how students learn, he adds.

So how would teachers know if a proposed reform is effective?

Can You Prove It?

Evidence is the magic word, says Adrian Simpson, principal of St. Mary's College at Durham University in England and professor of mathematics education.

It’s also the source of part of the problem.

Those questing for evidence-based education approaches tend to rely on randomized controlled trials, a robust form of study widely used in medicine to establish causation, Simpson notes. In education, that can mean field experiments that show a practice worked in a particular context or laboratory experiments in cognitive science, he says.

“But what [these] tell you is very powerful, but very narrow,” Simpson says.

These studies are taken to show that certain approaches work. But, Simpson says, they only really establish that the sum of all the differences in interventions caused learning for some participants. Which specific intervention worked, and whether it would work for other students, is hard to determine, Simpson says.

That also puts pressure on how changes are carried out in the classroom.

Imagine the best teacher. How much time goes into designing his or her lessons, refining them, and adjusting to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. That's what makes implementation of any reform effort so difficult, he says: to go from a general idea down into the details of making it work for a specific group of students, often across a range of different learning contexts.

So it’s tricky to translate the lessons of these experiments into learning.

Researchers also understand less about the mechanisms of how people think about, say, fractions than how kidneys function, according to Simpson, of St. Mary's College. So the evidence provided by experiments about specific practices in education is weaker than in other areas like medicine where it tends to be similar from person to person: “You can’t establish laws of the classroom that will apply everywhere,” Simpson says.

Ultimately, there’s no quick fix for the reform cycle, Simpson says. But he thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which is striving to make its interventions more attuned to personal peculiarities. Teachers should bring together insights from a number of sources — from research about memory capacity to tips from the teacher next door — to inform how they unlock learning for their students, he suggests. Rather than asking what they can do to make a student better with fractions, a teacher might ask: “What’s causing this child to handle fractions poorly?” That could provide an insight that isn’t solely focused on teacher interventions which could, nonetheless, help the student learn, Simpson says.

To Stigler, of UCLA, it’s hard to know what works in education right now.

Reform movements need to focus more on getting disciplined plans for moving from the idea phase to the implementation phase, he says. Teachers also need the time to make sure ideas have been effectively put in place, he adds.

Without that, Stigler says, nobody knows what’s truly effective.