We have been inundated by the media and our concerns regarding the current state of a child, adolescent, and adult mental health in the wake of the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have begun to calculate the impact in terms of developmental growth in social skills, maintained and acquired learning, behavioral and emotional stability. There has been a great deal of sustained suffering, impairment to daily functioning and coping, managing traumatic experiences, and pervasive losses shared among children and adults.
The Increase in Anxiety and Depression
While anxiety and depressive symptoms in children and adults have been growing steadily in the United States over the past decade, the progressive use of mobile media throughout all sectors of life has continuously impacted attention, relating, and emotional regulation in most individuals whose device use is greatly depended upon daily. Individuals living most at risk before the Covid-19 pandemic would see further and more extreme impact in terms of their physical and mental health symptoms as community environments and relationships were overwhelmed with the demands of the pandemic.
The Effects of Untreated Mental Health
The crisis of more people struggling more severely can be understood as the unexpected convergence of a growing phenomenon or a “developmental warming”. Maladaptive stress response patterns reinforce the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in children and adults. Like a mega-fire, these patterns within our homes, schools, and professional institutions have their climate, which runs itself and grows more powerful in deterring intervention. The increase of dysregulated behaviors of adults and children seen within daily routines and demands becomes chronic as they are inadvertently reinforced with our physical and relational habits.
With limited regulation practices within communities and family relationships and environments, our children’s attention spans, relatedness to peers and adults, and ability to learn and progress physically and mentally have been derailed. Our learning and caregiving environments have struggled to adapt and contend with such a widespread need for intervention to advance healthy physical and mental developmental growth. Room To Move helps individuals, families, schools, and healthcare communities create opportunities for regulation practices as the primary intervention and commitment.
Learning How To Manage The Crisis
Together, we can address the crisis with more focus on regulation practices within our family, school, and professional life. Much more emphasis on non-verbal, sensory, and movement infused all day in all settings as a community systems response perspective. We have learned much from the body of research regarding the impact of stress throughout the life cycle. We know that how we schedule or don’t schedule our lives affects us daily. We know that sleep and physical activity are essential to our physical and mental health throughout our life. We can shift the burden of care systematically and away from reinforcing the idea that all treatment comes from individual therapy agreements. We can all agree that the need is far beyond a one-on-one approach to care and requires multiple modes of intervention individually, collectively, and simultaneously.
Teaching Regulation Practices Can Create a Positive Impact
Room To Move is about changing our physical and mental states by maximizing health and wellness opportunities throughout our days and weeks. We cannot be waitlisted for intervention with someone or somewhere. We can make the practice of self-regulation and managing stress across all settings of our lives a priority. Families, schools, and physical and mental health care settings can help us all attend to stress with the basic proven strategies to continuously reset our reactions, in all locations, within our professional roles and personal relationships. If you would like to learn more about our services, or how you can get started today, contact us by calling (802) 989-2550 or by filling out a contact form. There is room to move, rest, and breath throughout our day, every day right now.