Fewer Fairfax County Public School students reported mental health problems last year than the year before, according to the county’s annual youth survey.
The voluntary, anonymous survey is administered to thousands of middle and high school students in sixth, eighth, 10th and 12th grades. In 2022, more than 11,000 sixth graders and more than 27,000 eighth, 10th and 12th graders participated, the county said.
Daryl Washington, executive director of the Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board, said at a recent meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Health and Human Services Committee that “across the board with stress, depressive symptoms, suicide ideation and suicide attempts, they’re all down from the 2021 numbers, which were high”.
In 2022, 28.9% of students reported symptoms of depression, down from 38.1% in 2021. This measure had increased every year since 2016, according to the district’s data. The percentage of students who reported experiencing high levels of stress also dropped, from nearly 30% in 2021 to 23.5% in 2022.
The promising trends come as Virginia’s largest school system and county leaders are working to help students in the aftermath of the pandemic. The school system, for example, has offered free virtual mental health sessions to high school students, an initiative that school leaders have publicly said they want to expand.
“There’s obviously still work to be done,” Washington said. “But the fact that these numbers are going down from the 2021 numbers is definitely a positive sign.”
However, Washington said LGBTQ+ students are at a “really high risk” for feeling sad or hopeless and for suicidal thoughts or attempts compared to the rest of the population.
The Fairfax County students who participated in the survey had lower rates of substance use than students nationally for most of the substances listed on the survey, Washington said. More than 7% of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-grade students reported using alcohol in the past month. The national average is over 15%.
More than 5% of students reported vaping in the past month, and 4% reported using marijuana, the survey found.
Maintaining the trend is critical, Washington said, because “if you have a youth who has a mental health issue and is using substances, they are at a significantly higher risk than individuals who are not using substances.”
Nearly 25% of students who reported using a substance also said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous year, the survey found.
Separately, 82% of eighth, tenth and twelfth graders said they felt safe at their school.
