How schools can combat a surging mental health crisis among teenage girls + new website announcement
Education Lab data shows that Youth Guidance’s Working on Womanhood (WOW) is helping to mitigate the impacts of trauma on young women.
As the CDC recently reported, young women across the country are engulfed in a surging wave of violence, trauma, and mental health challenges. In 2021, almost 1 in 3 high school girls reported seriously considering suicide – a nearly 60 percent jump from ten years ago. In Chicago, a staggering 38 percent of 9th – 11th grade girls in public schools exhibit signs of PTSD – double the rate experienced by service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite this, there’s been little peer-reviewed research on interventions that mitigate the impacts of trauma on young women. However, our promising new evaluation of Chicago’s Working on Womanhood program – just released in Science Advances – is helping to change that.
WHAT THE DATA SHOW: PEER COUNSELING CAN REDUCE GIRLS’ PTSD, ANXIETY
Working on Womanhood (WOW) is a weekly school-based peer counseling program from Chicago non-profit, Youth Guidance. WOW uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help girls build their self-esteem and heal from traumatic events and currently serves about 2,600 students across 41 schools throughout the nation.
Education Lab researchers found that the WOW program reduced PTSD symptoms among participating girls by 22 percent, reduced scores that indicated “at-risk” levels of PTSD by 38 percent, and decreased symptom-severity scores of anxiety and depression by almost 10 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
WHAT IT MEANS: A PROMISING ROADMAP FOR SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE
Young women often don’t show the same outward signs of trauma that young men do. Nonetheless, our research suggests that the impacts of trauma on young women – including from high rates of gun violence – are persistent and widespread. Given limited resources, schools should direct funding towards interventions that are evidence-based, cost-effective, and easily scaled. WOW is one such program: at a cost of approximately $2,300 per participant, it far exceeds standards for cost-effectiveness.