The Support I Wish I Had In High School
By Rhys Hedges
According to the The Trevor Project, 41% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in 2023, including roughly half of transgender and nonbinary youth. Back when I was in high school, I would have been a part of this statistic. I experienced severe mental health issues that significantly impacted my ability to attend and do well in school, despite having more than a 4.0 GPA prior to the onset of the worst of my mental health struggles in 2017. Back then, my family and I were looking for support anywhere we could find it. And because being in a classroom is a huge part of a young person’s life, this included school. Despite having a good support system outside of school, my underfunded public school failed me in the ways I needed it to.
I consider my junior and senior years of high school to be the peak of mental illness over the course of my life, but my journey did not start or end there. I believe there were many steps along the way in which, had the public school system been properly funded and managed, the worst of the effects of my mental health could have been prevented. If teachers and counselors had the capacity to give students individualized support, if class sizes were smaller, if administrators were not so quick to punish “underachieving students”, I think I would have thrived in high school. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and when I asked for support, my school essentially told me my only option was independent study – and then did not even follow up on promises to set me up with independent study. I was able to switch to a school that would let me do independent study so I could receive the treatment I needed, but this disconnected and isolated me from my peers.
In the end, once I had completed treatment, I wasn’t able to finish my senior year with my friends and classmates as I so desperately wanted. I was, thankfully, able to walk with my graduating class, but it was a more lonely experience than it should have been due to having been disconnected from them for so long. I am endlessly thankful for the support from my family and mental health professionals during that time, but I still grieve for the normal high school experience I could have had.