I’ve been thinking a lot about adolescents and systemic intervention for quite a few years now. Each time another student-related tragedy occurs – most recently the Tucson shootings – I’m reminded of those that came before: Pearl, MS (1997), Columbine (1999), and Blacksburg (2007). There have been many initiatives as a result of youth mass violence: certainly, the needs and wants of the mental health care system are brought abruptly into the public consciousness once again. We try to do better, learn from our collective mistakes, work toward the best – prevention of future tragedies.

We’re relationship therapists: we think systemically, conceptualize cases relationally, and conduct interventions not only with individuals, but often with their family members and significant others in their lives. With children and adolescent clients, this often includes teachers, guidance counselors and coaches and other mentors. As “relationship experts,” who better to advocate for early intervention for children by working through the systems in which they live their lives: families, schools and the wider community.

We need a plan for our children and adolescents, their families, their schools and communities. This plan should start with a consortium that aims for mental health wellness and preventative measures (more on that in a moment). Some Virginia delegates are working on legislation that calls for anti-bullying programs in the schools (great!) that would be conducted by teachers. Wait a minute: teachers? They have too much to do already! So, great idea at the program level, but let’s consider how to best serve our children, our schools and our communities: we need mental health professionals for this.

Let’s return to mental health wellness and preventative measures for a moment. An examination of violence reveals that what the perpetrators seemed to have in common was a history of being bullied. That makes them not only perpetrators, but victims, something anti-bullying education could address and ideally, prevent. As systemic interventionists, we know that anti-bullying education will work best if all the children's systems are working together: home, school and community. I have been thinking about this since Columbine: “our nation’s teens suffer from anger, angst and apathy,” I wrote then. I would amend that slightly now: the apathy I referred to was the seeming avoidance of peers in taking an active role in helping peers or garnering adult support for intervention. Columbine was a terrible lesson: now our kids are taught to get help for a suffering peer. On the other hand, since Columbine, we’ve seen a new conduit of suffering with the rise of cyberbullying: we see its tragic effect in suicidal youth, the flip side of homicide, where a sad and angry child turns that anger against self rather than outward at others. In Columbine and Blacksburg, the perpetrators did both. This is beyond sad and sobering.

Here is what we know: perpetrators of violence, which includes bullying, unless they are sociopathic, don’t really feel good about what they do, even while they may have a cognitive distortion that they are justifiably angry. They bully from a context of egregious negativity: profoundly low sense of self worth, relational difficulties at home or in the community. We need a formalized community mental health wellness plan that draws on systemic intervention: involving our kids, their families, their schools. Just as every child has the right to a free and public education, don’t they also have the right to the best that we can bring to them: safety, ways to achieve optimal self-worth, and when necessary, interventions in homes and schools that provide them the best chance to succeed – and the best chance for their families to help them do so?

Parents don’t always know what’s happening at school, and teachers don’t have a window into their students’ homes. Families assert schools are in charge of educating our children. Educators state that families need to step up, be more involved in their children's education. They’re both right. Consider the possible interruptions of a quality free and public education when you’re worried that you’ll be bullied in the cafeteria – that'll take your mind off your studies, with rejection and sadness, which you then risk smothering with anger.

We need to expand the definition of education, and offer the possibility of emotional health and wellness to our next generation: give them built-in protections, help them learn emotional hygiene, promote inoculation against negative choices – both social and emotional.

Systemically trained mental health providers acting as “school and family behavioral interventionists” are the optimal choice for wellness and prevention as we work with the whole child: benefits accrue academically, socially and emotionally. We need to help our children navigate their large world from their collective vantage points: classrooms, living rooms, local and cyber communities. As systemic mental health providers, I believe we cannot remain silent, and wordlessly watch tragedy continue to unfold, but instead step toward the problem and seek to change it. Remember “isomorphic to the process” in your training: If we attend to the welfare of our “whole child,” they will know they are worthy of that attention.

I invite discussion and expansion of these ideas among the readership.

Julie Sayre

Note: This also appears in my own website -- www.relationshipcenterofloudoun.com