Loss, Grief and the Mental Health of K-12 Students

This monthly column promotes awareness of mental health issues in our region by licensed mental health professionals and university educators

Loss, which resides at the core of grief, is universally and uniquely experienced by human beings ?? someone or something that we love and value is gone, and we grieve the loss. Whenever a school is in session, there are students within the school who have experienced a personally significant normative/typical/predictable loss (i.e., a common developmental or maturational/transitional loss) or a non-normative/atypical/unpredictable loss (i.e., an unexpected, traumatic/violent, or "off?time" loss) that they are grieving.

Because grieving may negatively impact students' mental health, social interactions, and learning, school personnel should be mindful of and appropriately responsive to the various losses that students experience along their life journeys.

A student's grief over a loss can stem from many causes other than the death of a family member or peer (for example, experiencing parental separation, divorce, illness, or imprisonment; moving to a new area and changing schools; dissolving an important friendship; being bullied or rejected by peers; breaking up with a romantic partner).

Also, a student's developmental age/stage frame their current understanding of a loss experience, affect their loss-related coping capacities, and mediate their cognitive and psychosocial reworking of the implications and personal meaning of a specific loss experience. Additionally, students who experience personal losses that result from different causes (e.g., death of a loved one, death of a pet, parental divorce, relocation, and various types of abuse) can manifest similar behavioral effects, including academic failure/apathy, acting out behaviors due to displaced anger, aggression, inappropriate risk-taking, running away, sexual promiscuity, and substance use.

Although adults may underestimate and trivialize the psychological impact of some losses that children and adolescents experience, any personally significant loss, particularly a trauma-related loss, has the potential to create emotional blocks to learning that negatively impact a youth's attention and memory capacities, and, consequently, may result in diminished academic performance and social-emotional wellness. A student who experiences many loss-related experiences within a short time frame that overwhelms his/her coping skills may be especially predisposed to emotional, behavioral, and academic difficulties.

Because of the time that they devote and the bonds that they develop with students, teachers may observe indications of grief in loss-affected students' academic performance, attitudes, and verbal/social behavior. School-based support services professionals, such as school psychologists, counselors, social workers, and nurses, can both foster and provide school-based support for loss-affected students and facilitate outside referrals when warranted. Indicators of possible chronic difficulties for grieving youths may include: worsening of any extant behavioral/emotional difficulties; loss of interest, appetite, sleep, and/or inability to engage in customary activities; significant and persistent interference with developmental tasks and school performance; increase in harmful coping and impulsive behaviors; and social withdrawal and isolation.

Many children and adolescents cope well with and adjust to the death of a loved one (or other personally significant loss experience) without any clinically significant psychological difficulties. As such, the provision of formal therapeutic post?loss interventions might be unnecessary, and the complicated and new should not replace the tried and true activities of empathic, active listening, and reflection. However, some bereaved youths might need and benefit from monitoring and specific professional intervention and support from both inside and outside the school. Also, given the comfort levels of individual students for specific activities to express their grief after a loss (especially a death), many professionals have advocated the use of an integrative counseling approach with grieving youths [i.e., an approach that includes a variety of methods, such as creative arts activities (drawing, music, writing), support groups, individual/group counseling, and bibliotherapy].

The Coalition to Support Grieving Students, which was recently convened and supported by the New York Life Foundation and the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, is a collaboration of leading professional organizations representing school administrators, classroom educators, and student support services personnel. The Coalition has developed and maintains a free practitioner-oriented website - http://grievingstudents.scholastic.com - that contains information/training modules to assist school personnel to address the following loss- and grief-related issues in their schools: (1) communication and support; (2) cultural considerations; (3) practical considerations; (4) impact on learning; and (5) self-care (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2015).

Children's and adolescents' personal loss histories, current environmental supports and stressors, and interpersonal risk and protective factors can affect their post?loss mourning and social?emotional adjustment. Awareness of the a youth's baseline mental health and knowledge about the current situation are critical, if adults are to understand the youth's reactions to loss and to gauge the validity of presumptions regarding any perceived "excessive grieving" and the need for further assessment/intervention. Although grief is a natural process resulting from a loss experience and school personnel may assist students to cope with personal losses, some youths' grieving processes may not always proceed healthily and become complicated, such as youths with extant mental health concerns, youths involved with traumatic deaths, and currently healthy young people who are emotionally or environmentally vulnerable (e.g., students who experienced the death of a parent or those who typically receive little or no emotional support from adults in their lives). In such cases, referral for mental health assessment and intervention outside the school setting may be indicated. However, in many instances, the assistance that educators can provide to students who have experienced a personally significant loss may often be as simple as just being available to sit and listen to their pain, and, perhaps, lending them a shoulder on which to cry.

Dr. Gary W. Mauk is an allied professional and associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Counseling at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP).