Before becoming the YAM Program Manager at Montana State University, I was a high school teacher in Helena, MT for ten years. It was there, that my belief in helping young people talk about mental health, develop resilience, and know where to go for help grew and intensified, as we endured the crisis of six students completing suicide in a short time period.
To this day, I still feel ill when thinking about what it was like to be told another student had taken their own life and knowing I would have to go back to my classroom and tell my students the devastating news. My students would ask, “Why is this happening again?” and “What were we going to do to make it better?”, and I was always at a loss of words and would answer, “I don’t know.” Truthfully, the feeling of hopelessness and panic has never really left me.
It became incredibly clear that we (and many other schools across the state) needed a proactive and systematic approach to teaching mental health to students. The stigma surrounding mental health needed to be broken. Luckily, others in the community and state felt the same way, and Montana State University brought Youth Aware of Mental Health to Montana in 2016 with three schools agreeing to pilot the program.
Since launching in 2016, YAM in Montana has grown from three schools to approximately 30 and over 5,000 students have received YAM to date. YAM can be found in rural schools being taught by trained instructors that are Extension Agents, as well as in large schools taught by instructors through the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery.
Post by Kelley Edwards, YAM Instructor and YAM Program Manager at the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery, Montana State University