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in
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Mental Health Help
Coming To 100
Michigan Schools

TRAILS program will help students with
depression, anxiety and other challenges.

JENNIFER LOVY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

TOP: School professionals
are trained in cognitive
behavioral therapy
(CBT) to help students
cope with mental health
challenges.
BOTTOM: Professionals
learn how to coach
mindfulness techniques,
such as meditation.

24

November 1 • 2018

jn

sponsored
by our
community
partners

I

t happens all too often; school pro-
fessionals return from a workshop
completely energized and ready to
implement their newly acquired skills
only to realize that they need ongoing
guidance to most effectively apply what
they’ve learned. As a result — and despite
the best of intentions — workshop bind-
ers frequently end up tucked into a desk
drawer or stashed away on a bookshelf.
Dr. Elizabeth Koschmann, program
director for the University of Michigan’s
TRAILS program
(Transforming Research
into Action to Improve the
Lives of Students), didn’t
want that to happen with
the program she would
ultimately create to bring
Dr. Elizabeth
cognitive behavioral thera-
Koschmann
py (CBT) and mindfulness
to Michigan schools as a
way to use evidence-based practices to
help students decrease symptoms of anx-
iety and depression.
TRAILS was launched in 2013 after
several Ann Arbor schools reached out to
the Depression Center at the University
of Michigan. School staff members
were having a difficult time handling
the increasing number of students with
mental health needs such as depression,
anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder
and suicidal thoughts.
Koschmann designed this grant-fund-
ed program to not only train school
mental health professionals to use CBT
and mindfulness but also support them
by providing four months of in-school
coaching as they teach these skills to
small groups of students. In addition
to having a coach attend meetings and
give feedback and support, facilitators
have access to a library of materials and
resources to use in running their groups.
“School is often the only source of
behavioral healthcare that these kids will
get, which means that if care isn’t effec-
tive, those students are never going to
get better,” said Koschmann. “They need
some really useful skills in their toolbox
and CBT and mindfulness can be very
impactful.
“Unfortunately, we know that of the
kids who have serious mental health ill-
nesses, only about 20 percent of them are
accessing treatment,” added Koschmann,
who came to Ann Arbor in 2011 with

her husband and sons, ages 6 and 9.
Because all schools contend with help-
ing teens who are not getting access to
the mental health care they need, the
schools are logical places to put services,
according to Koschmann. Locally, stu-
dents at West Bloomfield and Berkley
high schools can look forward to the pro-
gram starting sometime in early 2019.
Thanks in part to funding from many
sources, including a multi-million-dol-
lar grant from the National Institutes of
Mental Health, TRAILS will be provided,
free to educators, in 100 schools through-
out the state. When the program was
first started, funding was $50,000. “We’ve
gone from $50,000 to $5 million in five
years,” according to Koschmann. TRAILS
also just received a portion of the pro-
ceeds from an Oct. 27 tennis fundraiser
sponsored by the George Orley Mental
Wellness Initiative.
Mallory Schwartz, a licensed profes-
sional counselor and nationally certi-
fied counselor with a private practice
in Bingham Farms, will be coaching
the program at Berkley High School.
Following her TRAILS training, Schwartz
used the program with two of her cli-
ents. After measuring their anxiety
and depression before and after going
through the program, she noted that
both teens showed “a decrease in their
anxiety and a significant decrease in their
depression,” and she looks forward to
helping to implement it at Berkley.
“Schools have always been about car-
ing for the whole child although in the
past the emphasis has been on academ-
ics,” said Jonathan Stern, a social worker
at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School, one
of the first schools to get onboard with
the TRAILS program.
He added: “Now, there is greater rec-
ognition of the need to address mental
illness in the schools. This program is an
easy way to address the mental health of
our students, and it fits well within the
school framework. Students carry their
stress with them every day while they
are at school, and it makes a great deal of
sense to help them where they are strug-
gling.”
To learn more about TRAILS, includ-
ing training programs and how to bring
the program to a school, visit
trailstowellness.org. ■

