Website tackles ‘taboo' subject
Group hopes pages will help inform both students and parents
By Bob Fenske
Of The Summit
FOREST CITY - The statistic is, to put it mildly, sobering: One in every five people under the age of 18 has some kind of mental disorder that interferes with how they think, feel and act.
And as Forest City resident Paul Fitzgerald put it, "when it spins out of control, it's 9:30 on a Friday night ... not when there are exactly a lot of experts around. ... If we had a measles problem affecting 20 out of 100 kids, you can bet the state would be going crazy.
“But mental health is still a taboo subject for a lot of people. We want to change that.”
Fitzgerald is part of a committee that has been working for two years to reach young people with mental health issues and to give parents a resource they can access when they've run out of ideas on what's bothering their children.
The committee unveiled its plans at a community meeting last week when they announced a link called "Mental Health and Well-Being" will be placed on the Forest City Community Schools website beginning Dec. 1.
The link is meant to provide information and both local and national contact phone numbers on eight mental health disorders that are most common among young people in our area.
"It's not meant to replace treatment and we're up front with people right away," Fitzgerald said, "but it gets the information to people who need it when they need it. ... It has the signs to look for, it has numbers to call. ... The idea is to point people in the right direction."
The eight disorders listed on the website include depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, alcohol and substance abuse, eating disorders, suicide awareness and prevention, cutting, dating violence and bullying.
Forest City Elementary School Principal Steve Putz said the reason the committee held the community meeting is because it wants to share the website with other communities and organizations.
"This is not just a school problem or one community's problem," he said. "We are all - churches, schools, communities - dealing with some of these issues, and if we can at least help people understand what they're going through or what their children are going through, hopefully we can point them in the right direction."
Fitzgerald said the members of the committee, one that formed about two years ago and still doesn't have a name, tapped in to numerous mental-health professionals to make sure they were using respected websites as links.
"There are 2 million websites out there on mental disorders," he said, "but unfortunately, three-quarters of them are not good, not safe. We went to the people who know and they helped us make sure we had reputable sites that can lead people to the right people who can give them the right help for their particular problem.
Fitzgerald said there will be a "maintaining committee" to update the website with new material.
"I have a passion for this," Fitzgerald said, "and I have to be honest with you, some of these things - like cutting - I had never heard of before we started this. But it does happen, and burying our heads in the sand and hoping it goes away, that's not the answer."
Story created Nov 11, 2008 - 14:29:49 CST.
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