As the leaves start to brown, the cold morning breeze persists through the day, the skies darken as final exams are just around the corner and the cheerful ambience at Palo Alto High School starts to subside.
The stress of academics and schoolwork is beginning to weigh on Paly students, many of whom start to lose the excitement that energizes them every day. When one’s desk is cluttered with practice tests and homework assignments — in addition to extracurricular activities and sports practice — it’s rare to find time to care for one’s mental health.
The Bay Area, especially Palo Alto, has given students substantial pressure to perform well. As classmates are creating non-profit organizations and publishing research papers with Ivy League professors, the strain to measure up to high expectations manifests itself as competition between students.
Rex Martin, a Paly junior, has faced this pressure first-hand, which has caused him ample stress throughout his years at Paly.
“I feel like the culture at Paly is really centered around getting good grades and getting into good colleges,” Martin said. “This has created a lot of pressure [for me] to keep up and made it harder to focus on actually learning, shifting my focus [instead] towards the outcome of my work. This has led to increased stress and anxiety not only [because of] my grades, but also in what comes after high school, with college and such.”
For many, such as Paly sophomore Atrina Pourmahmood, it is this shift in focus that leads individuals to forget to prioritize their mental health.
“With Paly’s high competitiveness comes constant comparison and perfectionist norms,” Pourmahmood said. “Many students will get so absorbed in achieving high grades that they neglect themselves.”
Senior Luka Balva is one of the several students who find it difficult to avoid the competition that is seemingly ingrained in Palo Alto culture. This struggle pushed him to seek out for his mental health from a therapist after feeling pressured.
“Paly and Gunn, specifically, definitely contribute to the need to go to therapy,” Balva said. “But it’s hard to change that culture since there are a lot of driven people here who want to take a lot of hard courses, even though they’re given the option not to take that path.”
Though the pressure from Paly can have an effect on students’ mental health, the pressure found is not extremely different from other schools; if anything, Paly may be better than some due to the access to help that the community has. Meredith Ackley, a Paly mother, is one of many parents who have observed pressure from school affecting their kids, no matter what school district they are located in.
“I have friends in many areas across the US, and I feel like the pressure to perform is a little bit higher up at Paly,” Ackley said. “We’re surrounded by successful people, so I think that kind of plays into it. … But we live in a well-resourced community [where] our students have access to [a] Wellness Center to address these issues on site, which is unique.”
The problem persists when discussions about mental health with one’s teacher, one’s family or one’s friends aren’t normalized.
“I find it a little uncomfortable [to reach out] because that’s not what you usually talk about,” Balva said. “I haven’t met anyone who starts a conversation with ‘let’s talk about going to wellness and going to therapy,’ at least in everyday situations when you’re meeting with friends.”
The topic of mental health is uncomfortable for many. With the plethora of judgments and assumptions that correspond with it, it is common for people to try to shift away from the topic, even when it is an occurrence that many people experience.
However, for many, the avoidance of these important and heavy conversations can obstruct individuals from receiving the help they may need before it is too late.
Eric Salvatierra, Ackley’s late husband, took his own life after battling bipolar disorder. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder is a condition that creates emotional fluctuations between extreme highs and lows.
“I felt like my daughters had the right to tell people that their dad died of bipolar [disorder] and [receive] the same amount of compassion as someone whose dad died of cancer,” Ackley said. “That was super important to me, and I wanted them to be able to talk openly about it … and not have anybody think [of their dad or his struggle] differently.”
When discussing the topic of mental health and what works best for each individual, the subject can be convoluted with vastly different opinions. For some, talking about their life experiences to a therapist is beneficial as it gives them the chance to express and release their pent-up emotions. Laila Joshi, a Paly junior, learned to talk to those around her to help her confront the challenges she faces.
“Talking to people around me was really beneficial,” Joshi said. “A lot of times, it helped me to understand more about what was going on for me, and it broke the stigma I previously had around opening up about mental health.”
Being able to openly communicate with people and therapists brings more than just mental health improvements for oneself.
“In a way, [talking to others] also brought a sense of connection, knowing [that] others may have similar experiences like me,” Joshi said. “Opening up helps people have empathy for others and learn to lean on one another when needed.”
While Joshi believes that pouring out one’s mental burdens externally is beneficial, others feel that expressing their feelings in therapy is redundant and stressful, exacerbating the problem rather than alleviating it.
“Sometimes I didn’t really have anything to talk about, or I didn’t really feel open to going super deep,” Balva said. “Sometimes the sessions are timed inconveniently, so it actually causes more stress rather than less.”
As someone who has been in therapy for four years, anonymous Paly student Quinn began at a time of deep personal struggle.
“I started therapy soon after my mom had realized that I would physically harm myself if I felt really upset, [which comes from] lots of self-hate,” Quinn said.
Over several years, therapy transformed Quinn’s outlook and provided tools to navigate life’s challenges. Having access to non-judgmental listening and strategies given by a therapist is helpful towards ameliorating her situation.
“[Therapy] definitely helped me through a lot,” Quinn said. “It helped me find things or confront things that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have a therapist, and I must say I definitely did stop hurting myself after I [received therapy]. At first, I was a bit unsure, because a stranger knew all my secrets. But now, I really trust them because I have been talking to them for four years.”
Quinn does not come from an environment that fully supports therapy, however.
“My mom has a therapist and really likes [therapy and] thinks that everyone should have a therapist,” Quinn said. “My mom likes it because she thinks that everyone should have someone to talk to. And my dad doesn’t like it because he doesn’t see why he should be paying to talk to someone.”
Progress can be slow, yet therapy’s potential to prevent personal issues from worsening may be substantial, with therapy lessening the difficulty of everyday struggles.
“Sometimes it can take a while for things to happen, and it can feel like it’s not working; other times, you can have breakthroughs,” Quinn said. “Although therapy is not for everyone, it can help. Therapy is supposed to prevent [situations from] getting worse and help you calm down.”
The most significant barrier to therapy is finding the courage to break the stigma and take the first step forward. Salvatierra was only diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 39, and even afterwards, he and his family were never able to receive the help they needed fully.
“One of the hardest things about [Salvatierra’s] battle was the fact that there was so much stigma and shame, and we didn’t tell people about it,” Ackley said. “His doctors told him not to tell his people about it, because people would look at him differently. It just made the whole thing so much harder for all of us, because we were in this big, silent bubble.”
However, after losing her husband, Ackley was able to break through this bubble and realize that change needed to happen.
“I realized that Eric didn’t have any context or understanding of mental health when in high school, so when he went to college, he didn’t understand that he was suffering. I wanted those conversations and education to start early for the next generations.”
Since her loss, Ackley has joined the board of directors for Bring Change to Mind, a non-profit organization that focuses on the conversations of mental health, where she helped develop their high school mental health awareness program. Through her activism and experience, Ackley acknowledges the discomfort in the process of reaching out for both adults and students.
At Paly, students have access to the Wellness Center throughout the school day. Andrea Barker, Paly’s mental health and wellness coordinator, knows the importance of this service, especially for high school students and even teachers.
“The Wellness Center has been here at Paly since 2016,” Barker said. “It was established as a way to offer on-campus resources for students so they have access to the support and care they need for their well-being. One of our main goals here is to create a community in which we’re all looking out for each other, so that if there is someone who needs to focus on their well-being, there’s no stigma attached to coming and accessing care here in our center.”
The Wellness Center has been a fundamental part of ameliorating the emotional well-being of the entire Paly population, not just for the students.
“Being a teenager is hard, being in high school is hard and living life can be difficult at times,” Barker said. “Even [for] the adults on campus, we all need to be able to have a space where we can … regulate ourselves and really be in the moment and get us back into a state of calm so that we can do the things that we need to do.”
Every student at Paly has the opportunity to get three drop-in therapy sessions every school year.
“During a student’s third drop-in visit, we discuss the potential need for ongoing therapeutic services along with parental consent,” Barker said. “If the student agrees, they are then assigned to a therapist for regularly scheduled sessions.”
Hesitance to get involved with this mental support may come from the lack of knowledge of what therapy truly provides. Once one has made an appointment with a therapist, they go through an intensive personalized evaluation rather than solely chatting.
“There’s an assessment process that they go through with you to identify goals and different issues that you might be experiencing,” Barker said. “It is tailored specifically for you as an individual, for what you’re going through, and it’s a team approach. We work with other adults on campus, too, to make sure that you’re getting the support that you need from your entire team here on campus, not just us.”
The process of receiving this service is quite simple, making it accessible and less stressful to take the first step for students and those in need of help. Whether through the form on the website, the QR codes on flyers around the campus or even making requests through the Instagram page, students can retrieve services in many different ways, according to Barker.
The first step in ensuring that the Paly community becomes a space that supports and cares for all members of the community is to make sure all members are comfortable expressing their needs so that nobody is ever apprehensive about reaching out.
“There should never be any type of stigma or embarrassment for accessing the care that you need for your well-being,” Barker said. “It’s okay to access that care, it’s okay to need that at certain points in your life in order to gain the skills that you need or to process things with someone else.”
At the end of the day, humans require support and assistance to allow themselves to thrive. Just like all individuals go to the doctor for yearly check-ups, everyone should take a moment to check up on the health of their minds and feelings.
“[Physical] Health is health and mental health is also health,” Ackley said. “It’s [important to] make sure that it always stays at the forefront of every dialog.”
