ASHEVILLE, NC – March 23, 2023 – Dr. Nick Ladd, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) in Asheville, observed that there is more anxiety in children “as the frequency of mass shootings has increased.” Asheville City schools and Buncombe County Schools have not had a school shooting in the past 5 years. However, students are networked to the media and social media which can cause feelings of anxiety and panic through their exposure to the terrible events. A 2021 study published in the JAMA Network Open, the Journal of the American Medical Association’s open-source access medical journal, find that students became worried about the violence happening at schools and that this was associated with feeling anxiety and panic symptoms 6 months later. This is consistent with a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center that found that almost 60% of 13-to-17-year-olds were worried about a shooting happening at school. Students are also very frustrated that school violence is continuing to take place.
The federal government does not track school shootings so the Washington Post has created a database from news reports, open-source databases, police reports, and directly calling schools and police departments. There have been more than 377 school shootings since the incident at Columbine High School in 1999, resulting in 349,000 students experiencing gun violence. These incidents have become more frequent since 2018. In 2022, there were 46 school shootings which were more than any year since 1999. A total of 199 children, teachers and staff have been killed; 425 have been injured.
The schools in Asheville and Buncombe County have many mental health providers for students to reach out to if they are emotionally overwhelmed. Dillon Huffman, Asheville City Schools’ spokesperson, says that their counseling department has not seen an increase of students with anxiety issues following the school shootings. The majority of students that take advantage of these services have anxiety from other issues. However, Dr. Ladd opines that the anxiety surrounding mass shootings may not be the presenting problem, although it may be a contributory source for anxiety. Learning resiliency skills like breathing exercises can help the affected students better manage their emotions so that they can refocus their attention to learning at school.
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Contact: Dr. Dick Needleman, Health reporter, 103.3 AshevilleFM, healthyasheville@ashevillefm.org