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After her father died during her sophomore year, Gisela Rosa felt pressure to complete her schoolwork and attend her classes, even though her mother encouraged her to stay home and take time to grieve.

Rosa struggled to readjust, though found some solace in the social worker at Manhattan’s Central Park East High School, who would track her down and pull her out of class to talk.

“Aside from her,” she said, “I didn’t feel like anyone at school understood where I was at in my life.”

Seven years after she graduated high school, Rosa now works as a therapist and is pursuing a doctorate degree at Alabama’s Auburn University for counseling psychology — a field she never anticipated entering while in high school. In recent years, she’s provided mental health support to college students, both as a therapist and as a peer mentor while she was still earning her undergraduate degree.

Increasingly, mental health professionals, like Rosa, have highlighted the importance of peer support in addressing mental health challenges, giving young people the space to speak openly with one another and training them to support their peers.

It’s a model that city and state officials have looked to since the onset of the COVID pandemic, when concerns rose about an uptick in students struggling with mental health challenges. A higher share of the city’s high school students reported feeling so sad or hopeless that they gave up their usual activities, as well as experienced suicidal ideation, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, based on 2021 Health Department data.

New York City Council members have passed legislation to bring mental health professionals into middle and high school wellness clubs, as well as expand informational materials for students seeking to start their own wellness club and training for students interested in peer-to-peer mental health programs.

Meanwhile, state officials have invested in programs to train high school students in recognizing and responding to signs of mental health and substance-abuse challenges among their peers. And New York City schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos is hoping to enlist students for peer-led anti-vaping and anti-bullying campaigns.

According to a national poll from 2022, teens were more than twice as likely to seek mental health information from their friends than teachers or other adults at school.

Though it’s been years since she graduated, Rosa still thinks about how her time in high school might have been different if she’d had access to mental health support from her peers — if she’d been able to talk with other students who could relate to the pain of losing a parent.

“I feel like my experience in high school would have been completely different,” she said. “It would have reminded me that I was a person, and I was allowed to grieve.”

Still reeling from pandemic, NYC students turn to peers

For students in New York City and across the country, the sudden onset of the pandemic in 2020 upended day-to-day life. Classes shifted online, and for many students, that meant a period of extended isolation from their peers. And as the virus spread, some saw their families experience personal or financial loss.

Though years have passed, educators continue to report lingering behavioral concerns. It’s something students, too, feel persisting.

“Every second, I still feel it,” said Cree Griffin, a senior at the Repertory Company High School for Performing Arts in Manhattan. “COVID really took its toll. It changed the world, and it will never go back to what it used to be.”

During her freshman year, Griffin led a mental health club for her peers, giving students space to speak openly about the challenges they faced. But the club eventually dissolved after Griffin faced a suspension at school, and though she tried to start it up again after a friend died during her junior year, she struggled to find support.

For Brandai Arnold, a freshman at the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change in Manhattan, returning to school has meant grappling with an instinct to isolate.

“It’s like, since I didn’t have that space to talk before, now I don’t want to talk at all,” she said. “Even when there are a lot of people around, you’re still isolating yourself, because that’s what we got used to.”

Although Griffin and Arnold haven’t always felt they could confide in adults or peers at school, both students said they’ve felt embraced by the community at The Brotherhood Sister Sol, a Harlem-based nonprofit that provides support and programming for city youth.

The nonprofit was one of several groups to call on the city to invest further in peer-to-peer mental health support during a City Council hearing in November.

“Peers just trust each other more,” said Rox Costello, a licensed social worker who works at Brotherhood Sister Sol. “When we ask them, ‘Who are you more inclined to go to to talk about these issues?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to talk to my best friend. I’m going to talk to my partner. I’m going to talk to my girlfriend, or my boyfriend, or whoever it is.‘”

Though Costello said it would be ideal for every young person to have a trusted adult to confide in about mental health challenges, they noted that isn’t the case for many teenagers. For some, their families might not understand the mental health challenges they face, making it even more difficult to speak up.

Peer-to-peer models can be critical for adding another layer of support, Costello added, with young people trained to recognize signs their peers are struggling, give them space to speak openly about their mental health, and connect them to resources that will help.

Arnold said she generally feels more comfortable talking about mental health with people close to her own age.

“Most of the people close to my age, I feel like I can talk to them better than I could anyone older,” she said. “When you talk to someone older, it feels like they won’t understand you.”

NYC mental health organization invests in peer support

In New York City, the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City has been ramping up peer-to-peer support for teenagers.

Tamar Cox-Rubien, a youth peer leader at the alliance, leads a free, weekly support group for teens. As a near-peer leader, Cox-Rubien has drawn on her own challenges with mental health to connect with the students in her support group.

“When you’re working in a peer-led model, I can share what’s going on with me,” she said. “I can share what works for me, empathize with them, and let them know that I have been in their shoes.”

The organization also operates a helpline, providing callers with emotional support and connections to mental health resources like therapy. That helpline opened for teenagers in January.

For many of the teenagers that Cox-Rubien works with, the pandemic significantly disrupted development, she said. With schools shuttering and moving online during their third or fourth grade years, many teens missed out on critical time with their peers, experiencing immense social isolation, she said.

“Teens are far more likely to entrust the mental health symptoms or emotions they may be going through to their friends, as opposed to adults,” Cox-Rubien added.

Eventually, the support group will transition into being led by the students themselves, after the organization trains interested students to serve as volunteer facilitators. Cox-Rubien said she’s seen the peer support model play a critical role in countering feelings of isolation.

“It offers that chance for teens to connect with others who’ve had similar experiences to them,” she said. “Creating that space of complete non-judgment and empathy, where they are learning together, where they’re going through similar things together, and where they’re combatting that isolation that comes with dealing with mental health struggles.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.