When the biggest advocates for mental health among students are the college students

To commemorate Mental Health Awareness Week, a group of students from Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram, Maine created the annual Hope Board last October. The sign, shaped like a huge tulip and displayed in the lobby, was covered with anonymous teenage aspirations. Some students hoped to pass driver training or have a successful playoff season. Others expressed more complicated desires. “To be more happy than angry,” wrote one student. Another wrote: 'I hope people are kinder and more mature.'

Camryn Baron, 17, founded the board as the founder of Sacopee's Yellow Tulip Team, a student group dedicated to mental health. “It's an outlet for some kids to express something outwardly and express what's bothering them,” she said.

Ms. Baron has struggled with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression; she is bisexual and has not always felt supported. “The things that many of us here reject or struggle with – to be able to share them with other people is validating,” she said.

Sacopee's Yellow Tulip Team is one of approximately 150 such clubs supported by the Yellow Tulip Project, a nonprofit mental health education and advocacy organization. Co-founded in 2016 by Julia Hansen, a high school student in Maine who had lost her two best friends to suicide, the nonprofit organization works to destigmatize mental illness and help students prioritize their emotional well-being.

In Sacopee Valley, the club plays upbeat music every Monday to welcome students and shares mental health information through morning announcements. Every autumn it plants a Hope Garden – this year 500 tulip bulbs – and celebrates the resilience of the flowers in spring with a youth wellness day full of workshops and activities. During the group's regular meetings, students can discuss stress reduction strategies, as well as the homophobia, socioeconomic inequality, and various stigmas that many teens experience in their conservative-leaning rural community.

In recent years, nonprofit programs that support school-based mental health clubs have been in high demand. The increase is the result of two phenomena: the rising number of adolescents struggling with mental health and the lack of resources to help them. While schools look for solutions, it is often the students who take the lead.

“When we think about mental health, it's not just about crisis intervention,” says Lisa Padilla, a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation who has studied mental health clubs. “The peer-based organizations create an environment at school that says, 'We value your well-being, and we know that this is part of who you are as a whole person.' That message helps students feel safe and empowered to speak about their own needs.”