Episode 1: Our Approach to the Student Mental Health & Substance Misuse Crisis
On this first episode of Inside The Mayo Lab, David, Meagen and Alexis outline the lab's approach to the crisis America's children, teens and young adults are facing. They discuss what makes the Mayo Lab different: the "magic mix," as David puts it, of innovative research to uncover solutions and engaging storytelling to bring those solutions to those who need them.
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David Magee, Director of Operations, The Mayo Lab: I am David Magee, and this is The Mayo Lab Podcast.
Some people might say we are a little bit crazy, let's be honest. And I think it's because who in their right mind, you have several people working together that have this big dream of helping solve or make a dent in America's team and student mental health and substance misuse crisis. And that's a pretty ambitious goal. Yet there's this small team of us at the University of Mississippi's William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing named after my late son, I should add. There's several of us who work there together. And The Mayo Lab, which brings you this podcast is a part of it. And part of a little bit of crazy, I think is we wake up every day and we have this synergy together, but we have this dream which is let's try to alleviate some of this pain and help students across this country find more joy.
And I guess that is a little bit crazy in the sense of it's so ambitious and there's just really three of us really in organized leadership roles around this institute in The Mayo Lab. And yet that's the dream we have. And I think another part of the crazy may be beginning with this very conversation, because this episode, so The Mayo Lab Podcast, it will launch weekly on Tuesdays as we bring researchers, we bring educators, we bring student voices from throughout the country to hear from them. But on Thursdays they're going to get, listeners will get our team, our team at the Institute and The Mayo Lab that is tackling this big problem. And so the little bit of crazy is we're going to give you a window into both our lives of who we are and why we're doing this and also how we plan on tackling this mission and why.
And I hope one day listeners will be able to turn back after two years and say, well, that's incredible. Look what they did. But also if we fall on our face, this podcast on Thursday's version that launches, it will be a reality show podcast. And if we fall on our face, you can watch and listen to us fall. And with that, I'll introduce the team. We have our leader, the researcher, our chief researcher, and she brings so much more than that. She's the executive director of the William Magee Institute, which also encompasses The Mayo Lab, and she is Dr. Megan Rosenthal. And Megan, it's humbling and honoring to me that sometimes I think, gosh, this institute named after my late son that somebody like you decides to do this work. So, what leads you to this work?
Meagen Rosenthal, Ph.D., Interim Executive Director, The Mayo Lab: Well, I'll start up with saying I'm humbled to get to be a part of something like this because when I first heard about William's story and got to know you and your family and the kind of extended community that you've created in this space, I thought what an amazing opportunity to help do something important. And further to that, as we started building out the work of the institute, something that really drew me to this is that we're doing it with questions and concerns of people outside of the institution, with community members who are living and breathing this every single day. And as someone whose work exclusively revolves around answering questions that are important to other people who aren't researchers, what an amazing opportunity to pitch in on something like that. And as you said in the introduction, a problem that's facing the entire country.
We have huge numbers of our young people being sad and facing anxiety and facing uncertainty and struggling and thinking of harming themselves and committing suicide and all of these different kinds of things. And how can we turn our eye away from that? This is important work, and I'm super thrilled to just get to be a part of it.
Magee: In a passion of yours is I've heard you talk about so often in university settings. And people mean well, they mean well but systems are set up where research is funded, it's done, and then it lives in a dusty corner. Your career has really been built upon a passion of taking that community work and being able to apply it to communities, which I think seems to be a key element which has further drawn you to this.
Rosenthal: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I'm incredibly grateful for this partnership amongst the three of us is that I'm trained as a researcher. So I really am not super great at talking to people on the outside about what this work is and how it's important or how they should think about using it in their daily lives. The storytelling that you and Alexis bring to this table allows the work that we do as researchers to shine in a totally different way because researchers do the work that we do to help people. That's the intention of it. But often that gets lost in the translation and the institutional structures that we have to work within. It's not really about translation in that kind of way. This allows us to do that in a totally different way and in a way that people can connect to and say, oh, that's why this is important. And oh, I can actually make that happen in my day-to-day life or have that hard conversation with somebody in my family.
Magee: Because the research in our case where we're dealing with students and then therefore families, trying to understand the full impact of what they face, engaging with them where they are, learning. Research is data. But the fact of the matter is these are humans. And across America, the research shows right now that teens are suffering from mental health and ways of which substance use disorder is a part of the mental health family. They're suffering in ways that we've never seen before in our country. And so what we do is we wake up every day and we've come together and some days when we're gathering around, when we're working together and we're daydreaming and we're talking about information we've found and we're making progress in actually how we think we can go put together a schools program or we have schools lining up wanting to work with us, and frankly, we don't actually have the solution yet, but we want to work with them because we want to solve this problem.
I enjoy it every day because we all arrive there with this spirit of believing this kind of David and Goliath thing that we can go do this. And part of a team I think is really having all the right parts. And I know you Megan, like myself, we're so honored to have Alexis Lee. She is our 26-year-old, I'll call her phenom in the sense of she's 26 going on many, many years of experience. And I actually in a former life wrote some books on lean manufacturing. Don't ask me why, don't ask me how, I don't plan on going back. But I learned a lot of lessons from lean manufacturing, how you take a small organization and how you create greatness. One of the key things that I always remember, and I pulled it out and I have it in my stack of notes that I try to live by, and one of them is manage like you have no power.
So, the idea is if we're going to create this lean institute that's going to go out and tackle this enormous problem across America, you got to make one really good hire and then you have to manage, you have no power. So, what we do, we bring in Alexis Lee, a graduate of The University of Mississippi, a former volleyball player, and we manage like we have no power. And the first day she worked, I said, all the power goes to you. II draw this circle and I say, this is you, you hold all the power. And so, it's been great in helping us really organize Alexis, to start to be able to bring what could be very overwhelming parts together because we are talking to schools in other parts of the country and we are discussing with other nonprofits and other entities that are making headway in schools education, and we're building a podcast. And if we didn't have somebody like you, I don't think we'd be able to do this. So, what calls you? How do you end up wanting to join us on this journey?
Alexis Lee, Program Manager, The Mayo Lab: I think it's what you talked about earlier of when you get lost in the service of others, you've really found your passion and your calling. And when we all sit together in the office and here at this table, you can feel how lost we get when we talk about helping other people and being of service to others. And we're giving all the power to the students. We want them to have their toolbox filled, to have their brains and knowledge expand. So I feel the energy when we talk about this in the office, and that's really where I am. I can look up some days and be like, we just did so many things and I'm not at all overwhelmed because I know we're serving such a greater purpose and I know that I was called to do this. And so it becomes so much less overwhelming when you're just like, bring it on. What you got?
Magee: You said something very important because as we build this institute and we think about how we meet teens where they are, because our problem in America, and it's no statement against anybody, I'm speaking collectively, is that I think we've taken our teenagers for granted. We have assumed they can handle and solve more that's being thrown at them of demands, of pressures of excellence, of expectations of who they will become, of what they will become, that they can manage this phone, this device and social media, that they can handle a pandemic, that they can handle the just at times bitter discord across this country. We take it for granted that they can handle that. And I don't think the research shows that they can, Megan.
Dr. Rosenthal: No, I think that's right. And I think that what we're seeing with our teens, and there's a report that came out earlier this year that talked a lot about this, that one in four, four in 10 of our students are feeling persistently sad or hopeless. And one third, about 29% of them experienced poor mental health during the year of 2021. And what you see a lot of times in the media is this idea, well, it was the pandemic. That pandemic stopped everything and then everything sucked for that period of time. And we're slowly starting to come out of that. But what this data is also showing us is we were seeing this trend upward in mental health issues even before the pandemic. And so then that forces us to start thinking about, okay, well what else is going on? And it is like you said, David, it's the social media proliferation, it's the technology, it's the performance pressure, because I've heard lots of parents talk about, well, I just want better for my kids than what I had.
Well, if you think about that in the context of the world we're living in right now, better is different than it was for my generation of parents, for my grandparents, for my great grandparents. The world is just not the same anymore. And so, I think we have to start thinking a little differently about what this looks like. But I was hardened to hear alongside all of the dire statistics as it relates to our teens, mental health and substance use issues is that they're, despite all of that, amazingly resilient, but it's like Alexis said, they need the tools and we just have dropped the ball in giving them what those tools are and figuring out and helping them weave those into their daily lives.
Magee: Yeah. I think in some ways we've gotten the academics right in our schools though there's always improvements to be made. Everybody's not going to be on a college track, for example. That's an area we can improve on in this country. But we have been really shy about creating mental health and holistic wellbeing curriculum in applications to get within schools. And Alexis, you said something I think that is going to be at the backbone of our culture as we go on this journey. We're going to take a cue from that lean manufacturing about how we empower you and you will empower employees that work with you. We are going to empower the students because it always strikes me as odd that a bunch of older gray-haired people decide they are going to tell students how they should feel and what they should do, yet we, one reason we have made inroads with schools, and not just in Mississippi but in multiple states of saying, Hey, actually we would like to join up on this because we have not walked in and told them what they should do.
What we have done is walked in and started a conversation with the students and began to listen. How do you, Alexis? Look, you are been a professional now for multiple years, I'm not equating you, even though you're finishing up that master's degree, that MBA, you still are technically a student, but I'm not equating you to somebody that still has the mind of understanding where undergraduate students are. But it is important that students are seen and heard, no?
Lee: Absolutely. And it's being able to meet them where they are and not expect them to be something or be at a level that they're not there yet because maybe that's what society thinks. Maybe that's what their parents want for them. Maybe it's what they think they should be at. It's really talking to them about, well, how do you feel? What do you want to do with your life? What makes you passionate? What makes you light up inside? And we've shied away from having those conversations because I think we're scared of them breaking the normal, "normal box" of what there should do. If they should graduate, they should go into an entry level job and they should stay in that career for 10, 20, 30 years. And while that was how it worked in the previous generations, that's not at all how things work anymore and how society and culture has been moving forward. And that's okay. I think there's so many benefits to breaking the normal, "normal box" of what your career should look like and not being afraid to do it just because it's what the expectations you feel are on you.
Magee: The most recent stats, Alexis, of it's almost hard for me to talk about what the CDC has released in terms of what young women are facing today, the teens, and it's certainly young men are being impacted as well, but there's pretty shocking statistics about young women in schools today across this country, how they're facing this persistent sadness. I got to believe that you having been an athlete on a women's volleyball team up through high school and club and college, and I got to believe you've got some drive, I certainly see to think we almost have to, we almost have to try to reach them and help them figure this out.
Lee: Yeah. So, the report is three in five girls felt persistently sad and hopeless, of last year it was 2021, or I guess two years ago. And so that I cannot sit here and say, we're going to change the next generation and ignore that. And it is hard. And I think social media plays a huge role. That comparison game of whatever you see everyone else doing, you can feel sad because you're not at their level of what they're doing, you're not as happy as they are. You're not accomplishing what they're accomplishing. You're not meeting these mile markers. You're consistently held up against each other. And I think the pressure that the females feel in the workforce to be able to compete with their male counterparts, I think that's been a big conversation for a long time.
I think we're finally starting to give girls their credit and give girls a voice starting younger, but I think it needs to start even younger to let them know that you can be whatever you want to be and you can do whatever you want to do, what you feel passionate about. You don't have to be whatever you want to be in the sense of culture.
Magee: So, Megan, as we begin to take our first steps into school's work, as we put together some pieces for so that you can begin to study, so we can take the next step to help some schools build a pilot program K through 12 we're talking about in schools. When you see data like that, do you envision really being able to a program that might be able to say, speak to young women differently because the studies are clear, there is a little bit of a difference.
Rosenthal: Yeah. I think the program will have to be tailorable to all of these different populations of young people that we have in our schools. So what works for young women and works for young men and works for transgendered people is going to be different by necessity. They're facing a different version of the society in which we live. So how we talk to them about what success looks like, because I think Alexis you brought something up that was really important. Yes, girls can be whatever they want to be, but that doesn't mean you have to be my version of success. And you don't have to be your version of success and helping young people, young women, young men, whomever, work through what does success look like for you and how do we then build that out in a way so that when you get onto social media, because I don't believe that's going away anytime soon, but when you look at social media and you look at the fabulous vacations or the million dollar mansion or what have you, you're like, that's great for them, but that's not me. And that's okay.
But we don't have that set of tools yet. So I think what we're going to be able to do with the schools program is really figure that out alongside our students. And I'm really excited about that because I think about the students that we have as part of the Happiness Team right now. They're amazing, thoughtful, careful human beings who have taken on being members of our Happiness Team over and above all of the gajillion other things that they have on their plate. They got school, they got other clubs.
Magee: Yeah, they don't have time for us, but they come.
Rosenthal: But they do. And if they can come, they're like, oh gosh, I'm so sorry. I can't be there. When they're not coming to my class, they're not telling me they're not coming to my class. But they do talk to us about not coming to the Happiness Team. And so I think that we've really struck on something, what both of you have talked about already is working alongside them to find the solutions. They don't know all the research, that's where I can come in and help that piece of it. But they're like thinking carefully about what they want and how they want it to be and what they want their lives to be like. We are going to build that for them in the schools program. We're going to build them the steps to make that happen.
Magee: So one of our members of The Happiness Team, and for listeners, what we've done at the University of Mississippi through our William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing and our Mayo Lab is we know the research says peer to peer education works. It works and it matters. And there there's an old saying, students get students on drugs and students get students off drugs. But it runs so much deeper. It's the full mental health spectrum of loneliness, of anxiety, of depression. Peers can help them understand they are not alone. There is not something wrong with them. So we put out a call, Hey, what students want to join our Happiness Team? We're going to help you learn the craft of peer-to-peer storytelling and you can help us learn. And then we will create some formats and forums in schools and through video, through our mayolab.com website for members of those Happiness Teams to tell their story.
And I was sitting with one last week, and she's a young woman, a freshman at the University of Mississippi, and she's like, I don't know if my story matters. And I said, well, help me understand your story. I'm sure it does, but help me understand. And she says, and she's fairly shy and introverted, which she owns. And she said, well, when I was in middle school, things just happened fast and where I'm just going through changes, and I realized my friends are changing, and then I realized or do I have friends and I'm going through something in a faith conversion, and I feel like I'm going through this and it's good for me, but I feel like it's alienating me. And then I suddenly realized I'm suicidal. And number one, I wiped a tear away. And I looked across at her and I said, ‘Hey, have you seen this study from the CDC?’
The CDC puts out a report. They tell us that young women are suffering sadness and depression in suicidal ideation in record numbers. The CDC doesn't have the solution. I'm looking at you. You are going to help us figure out how to take this messaging to young women and young men and help them feel better. And that's what this work is about. And she hopped up and understood what she was about and why she was going to take this risk and tell that story. And I'm going to be honest, she inspired me to realize this is why we do this. Because it goes back to what you said earlier, Megan, when we were talking about we have these entities, the CDC being one, SAMSA all these. Look, they do good work, they do valuable research, but the fact of the matter is they do not have this solution and we cannot look to them for it. If it doesn't start here in Mississippi, I don't know where it's going to start.
Rosenthal: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think that, so you might be able to tell my accent isn't from Mississippi. I'm originally from Alberta, Canada.
Magee: That you're not from around here.
Rosenthal: Yeah. But one of the things I love most about being in this space, I'm getting to know the people of this state and this region more closely than I ever had before, is the power of the people that live here, the community-based work that I've been able to do. You find that linchpin person in your community and it unlocks literally everything. You go from having two people at a meeting to having hundreds of people at that meeting. Why? Because the power of those relationships and the power of conversations that happen outside of those traditional models gives us access and an audience in a totally different way than we otherwise be able to have that. And I think that is why I'm so excited that this work is happening here, because we're going to be able to do that in a way that no other place in the country can do it.
Magee: We are uniquely prepared for storytelling. And I think that's why Mississippi, I live across the street from William Faulkner's house even today, I wake up every day. Today I actually woke up and a red fox came out of the woods by William Faulkner's house across my yard and into Faulkner's yard. And I had my poetic moment. So we are storytellers in this community and it's a backbone of what we do. But what we are embarking on with The Mayo Lab and our work with The Magee Institute is to take this storytelling nationally. We're here to serve our local community and our communities in Mississippi and regionally, but this podcast and what we need parents and educators and students to do is join us on this mission to help populate and share this information. All right. So, as I promised when we began early in this podcast today, that what we are going to do on these two Thursday episodes is we will also at times delve into the specifics of what we're going to do.
And that's a rare window into a window of a university's work, I think, and I applaud you guys for your humility to be willing to join that because we are going to telegraph a few things that we're going to do and time may show they work or they don't work, and that'll be both on us. But I think there'll be learning that comes from it. So, one thing that I think we're going to do, and it will be interesting for other listeners to, if we can inspire this in other communities, in other places, is this Happiness Team that we've talked about. So, there is research with a capital R and there's what I call small R research. I'm the anecdotal kind of layperson researcher.
Magee: How do you bring a lens to that or is there a lens you can bring to that as a researcher that may be able to at least guide us down into more formal research later as we go?
Rosenthal: Yeah. Well, some of the formal research has actually started, well hopefully starting soon. Our graduate student is going to be having some conversations with our current Happiness Team members to learn more about what's worked so far and how we at the leadership level have managed and put the Happiness Team together because, and you'll see as we continue having these conversations, most of the time we're flying by the seat of our pants and making it up as we go. And so-
Magee: Most?
Rosenthal: Okay, all, all.
Magee: Most?
Rosenthal: Yeah. Fair, all. And so, we put the call out to our student population here at the University of Mississippi and said, Hey, who wants to join? And we had a bunch of students join up, but we don't know really from their perspective if this is working yet. And so, our graduate student is going to be having those conversations. And so that's going to be the first capital R research that we're doing. And then as we, like you said, David, populate those videos on the website and we hear from other people in our community as we start sharing those around the state and around the region, the nation, that's where small R research comes in. Okay, what is resonating with people out in the community? What questions do you all have as you start hearing these and listening to these videos that we can then help you answer? Whether that's finding research that exists already or putting together new research projects.
And then as our storytelling troop of Happiness Team members grows, then we're starting to think about, okay, what is the impact of those storytellers on the storytelling listeners? Are our listeners getting the message that we hope they get? And then how do we quantify or capture that information? And then begin to share that out to really level up the data and the support we have for peer-to-peer storytelling, not just peer-to-peer education, because that combination of the storytelling and the education is really the magic mix-
Magee: ... Combination-
Rosenthal: ... of what we have here.
Magee: ... the magic mix. That combination is the magic mix. I was at a school just recently and I got to speak to the whole student body and then I was invited to a health class classroom afterwards where the students, I got to just engage with them and I said, Hey, so now you talk to me. What can we do for you? How do we reach you? What can we do for you? And they said, what just happened today. Having a discussion with us that's honest, that is transparent, that is relatable. That's the beginning.
And so, I think that The Happiness Team Project launching in The Mayo Lab and the William Magee Institute at The University of Mississippi is something that it'll be fun to see in two years have we gotten that work across America and have we found other partners to align with us? But even if we just get it in one school, it's the age-old adage that I can guarantee you we will change at least one life and maybe more. I'm David Magee and for Dr. Megan Rosenthal and Alexis Lee, thank you for joining us on The Mayo Lab Podcast.
Lee: The Mayo Lab Podcast is produced by Dr. Natasha Jeter, Dr. Megan Rosenthal, David Magee, Alexis Lee and Slade Lewis. This podcast was recorded at Broadcast Studio in Oxford, Mississippi. The show was mixed and mastered by Clay Jones, and our original music was composed by Slade Lewis. The Mayo Lab Podcast is brought to you by The William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing. For more information on The Mayo Lab, head over to the mayolab.com and follow us on social media at The Mayo Lab. If you enjoyed listening to The Mayo Lab Podcast with David Magee, we need your help. Tell others about it, and we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this podcast. This podcast represents the opinions of David Magee and guests of the show. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for the medical advice of a licensed counselor or physician. The listeners should consult with their mental health professional in any matters relating to his or who health or the health of a child.
Mentioned in This Episode:
Book: Things Have Changed by David Magee
Website: William Magee Institute
Website: Integrative Life Network
