Dr. Henry G. Brzycki and Elaine J. Brzycki: Leading to Cure the Mental Health Crisis among Teens

Announcing 3 Best Practices for Middle and High School Educators and Parents

STATE COLLEGE, PA, USA, July 30, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Brzycki Group and the Center for the Self in Schools is offering solutions for educators and parents to address the growing gap between teen mental health and teachers’ and parents’ ability to help.

According to a new study by the National Center for Health Statistics, parents think they are offering emotional support during critical teen years, but teens disagree. Therefore, teens are suffering in silence with nowhere to turn.

Henry G. Brzycki, Ph.D., says, “The inner life of teens is often hidden from teachers and parents, which results in a constant state of anxiety and depression—an existential condition. The old ways of dealing with it are after acute symptoms manifest, which is too late. The new solutions are preventative. You need to teach young people self-awareness for a healthier mindset, while also teaching parents and teachers how to help, so they can be on the same page.”

Teens do not have a framework and mental model of understanding their own mental health and well-being to be able to express what they are thinking and feeling—on the inside. There are three best practices that change this.

Middle and high school students are facing unprecedented emotional uncertainty and abuse, which impacts their well-being, mental health and ability to learn. In the 2023 Pennsylvania Youth Survey (PAYS), 66% of middle school students said that they have experienced emotional abuse, rising to 68% among high school students. Other studies indicate 80% of children and adolescents have lost hope and a sense of possibility due to increasing existential anxiety and depression.

Positive psychology expert Elaine J. Brzycki asserts, “we can do so much more for young people’s well-being with the most modern tools, and we should be.”

When a school discovers incidents of emotional abuse or emotional crisis, some educators call for banning cell phones, while others want to beef up their digital citizenship curriculum. Unfortunately, this simply attempts to use outdated behavior modification techniques to exert external controls to suppress what is actually an emotional problem.

Preventing emotional abuse requires imparting skills, competencies and attributes that a young person can draw upon when faced with difficult situations and painful choices. Young people from every part of the socio-economic spectrum are exposed too early to psychological uncertainty from degraded environments, political fights, family strife, illness, addictions, and on and on.

The solution is to teach self-awareness. Middle and high school students are in a life phase when they naturally try to differentiate and individuate, so they need help learning about what a healthy self feels like. When the self becomes the lens through which students learn, students can balance both cognitive with non-cognitive factors to become happy and whole people who are equipped to learn, create a positive life and contribute to society.

The research is robust and conclusive that self-awareness is the number one protective factor to both build success and to prevent mental illness. Positive psychology—which is the study of how people can flourish amidst life’s challenges—offers a new paradigm that imparts self-awareness and produces happy, healthy and flourishing young people from our schools.

The Brzycki Group offers middle and high school educators the cutting-edge methods that help teach young people about their internal life and self-awareness. The Brzycki Group developed pioneering research-based and evidence-based best practices that can be used by parents, teachers, medical doctors, counselors, teens and children. Middle and high school educators and parents of teens can implement these best practices to prevent mental illness and empower mental health and well-being in their schools and families.

Teachers, counselors, administrators, parents and students can make use of these best practices to transform young people’s abilities to learn self-awareness and to achieve mental health and well-being:

• The Integrated Self Model is a framework to understand the inner self and the whole person through 40 cognitive and positive psychology attributes that parents, teachers and health professionals can teach to young people to strengthen well-being.

• The Self Across the Curriculum is a pedagogy to teach self-awareness that teachers can integrate into their day-to-day academic curricula to build self-agency and internal motivation, among other attributes.

• The Success Predictor is a student success assessment instrument and intervention tool that parents, teachers and health professionals can use to impart well-being and preventative mental health skills such as life purpose and dreams.

A 154-page book called Purpose and Possibilities: How to Transform Your Life is suitable for middle and high school students. The book makes these best practices operational and understandable for young minds. The book can be used at home and in homerooms and other classes as a guide for students to practice exercises that teach self-awareness, well-being and how to build their own great future.

We can all agree that happy, healthy and flourishing teens do not do harm to themselves or others. By teaching the 40 attributes of a healthy self, educators and parents can help middle and high school young people to build skills that protect them from the stressors of modern life. Further, when educators and parents teach self-awareness, the process helps highlight those young people who may need further health screenings and additional emotional supports.

By teaching the attributes of a healthy and integrated self, educators and parents can provide teens with their own protective factors and prevention tools, which they can draw upon to better face the emotional challenges in school and in their lives.

Henry G. Brzycki, Ph.D., and Elaine J. Brzycki, Ed.M., have authored five best-selling books, numerous articles, and personal and professional development workshops.

Elaine J. Brzycki
The Brzycki Group & The Center for the Self in Schools
+1 814-753-2505
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