Junior and senior social work majors at Eastern Connecticut State University filled the Student Center Betty Tipton Room on Nov. 5 for the 10^th annual Social Policy Summit. This year’s policy topic of discussion was the youth mental health crisis.

Megan Stanton, associate professor of social work, said this year’s event featured improvements upon the previous year, driven by students. “Seniors, last year, you really inspired me in terms of the level of depth of policy analysis we took,” she said. “Big thanks to (social work Lecturer) Paul Trubey for putting this (event) together and the juniors for all your hard work."

Keynote address

Stanton’s opening remarks gave way to a keynote address from Thomas Burr, public policy and affiliations relations manager at National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Connecticut. Burr shared his story and discussed NAMI programming as it pertains to Connecticut’s youth.

“I always enjoy speaking with students because you guys are the future,” he said.

Burr first encountered NAMI due to lived experience with mental illness. His son began battling bipolar disorder during his senior year of high school. Amid his family’s search for solutions, Burr’s wife “dragged me kicking and screaming to my first NAMI support group,” despite his skepticism.

During this process, Burr shed his preconceived notions about mental health care. “There were people in my support group who were just like my wife and me,” said Burr, now a proud grandfather after his son got help, got married, and became a father and business owner.

Burr, a former high technology professional and real estate agent, was moved by his family’s experience with NAMI to enter the public policy profession. He shared with the students the services provided by NAMI Connecticut, including support groups, education classes, mental health awareness presentations, legislative advocacy training and suicide awareness/prevention training.

The event also emphasized the adverse mental health effects of youth and young adult social media use. “The challenge is separating the good information from the not-so-good,” said Burr.

He shared that, according to a study, one in six teenagers use TikTok as a search engine and that the vast majority of mental health advice on TikTok is misleading. “Critical thinking skills are huge because there’s so much misinformation and disinformation on the internet,” he said.

Burr concluded his portion of the event with a question-and-answer session with the students and faculty members. He touched upon funding being the difficult element of passing policies, as well as the present-day conversation around mental health being more productive than those in the past.

“It’s night and day from when I was a kid,” said Burr. “I grew up in an age when people didn’t even say the word ‘cancer’ out loud.”

Flash talks

Students’ research posters were set up around the perimeter of the room, and attendees stayed at their tables as the presenters gave three-minute flash talks on related policy issues.

Sarah Duffy spoke on the issue of social media-related policy. Upon her research, she discovered that “all the surrounding states” had policies meant to safeguard young people from the pitfalls of social media, but Connecticut did not.

“I’m hoping it will raise awareness of how dangerous the internet can be for children,” Duffy said of her presentation.

Other policy-related presentations discussed youth mental health issues not directly involving social media. Anneliese Person detailed her presentation on policies involving social-emotional learning, which helps people regulate emotions and social relationships and make good decisions.

Upon her group’s research, “we weren’t seeing as much emphasis on helping children cope with their own emotions on a daily basis,” said Person, highlighting the importance of developing strategies to do so.

Olivia Wettemann presented on the Increasing Mental Health in Schools Act with Bethany Clark and Toby Stanley. “It’s imperative that social workers are compensated for their work,” she said.

The full slate of presentations encompassed topics such as parental mental health and accessible childcare, protective policies around children’s use of social media, mental health in schools, telehealth and mental health in healthcare workers.

Junior social work majors Cheyenne Crumpler and Emma Cegielski took part in the event and its exchange of ideas. For Crumpler, who was part of one of the presentations, the summit was about “learning how to interact with my peers and support each other with this research we’ve been doing for months.”

Cegielski found the summit eye-opening in terms of the abundance of resources for social work students and those they impact. “In social work, acts of kindness can occur in a room like this at a micro level,” she said. She added that the event was “evidence that I can be more optimistic than I thought.”