Introduction
School shootings are a common occurrence in the United States. Even though they happen at a lower scale than the more prevalent gun violence, these incidents disturb the local communities and the entire nation. For the most part, public attention revolves around the victims who lose their lives. Keyes et al. (2019) indicate that people fail to pay necessary attention to the effects of school shootings on surviving kids. According to Clayborne et al. (2019), such occurrences have an enormous impact on the well-being of these children. In their formative years, children are at a stage when their brains and coping skills are still developing such that they react to stressful events in different fashions. That is why it has become increasingly important to understand the mental health consequences of school shootings. This paper presents an annotated bibliography of three articles investigating the effects of school shootings on children’s mental health. Empirical evidence indicates that school shootings adversely affect the mental well-being of children, and acceptable policies should be developed to guide the development of programs to help mitigate their impacts.
Discussion
‌ School shootings threaten children’s safety, creating the need for preparedness, especially in cases involving active shooter events. According to ElSherief et al. (2021), drills have been advanced as one of the approaches to make schools safer. Nonetheless, they argue that there is inadequate guidance on the defining attributes of drills and their effects, given the varied connotations of the term. For instance, there is no clear distinction between active shooter drills and lockdown drills. Further hurdles emanate from the vague state of drill regulations, such as the content, nature, and designation of who interprets their administration. Accordingly, ElSherief et al. (2021) state that children are mandated to participate in drills that differ dramatically across different schools in the United States. Some instructions require children and the school staff to hide in a specific area and exercise defined emergency procedures. In other cases, drills are conducted unannounced, featuring masked shooting performers, emulated gunfire, and fake blood.
The study further recognizes no consistency in the extant research on school shooter drills. Varied methodologies have been applied with mixed outcomes, such as participants may report feeling more set and less apprehensive after a drill. However, other findings indicate that children may feel frightened, less safe, and more concerned. The studies are predominantly undertaken in individual schools or districts where different drill protocols are applied. ElSherief et al. (2021) state that the nature of such studies limits the generalizability of the findings across the country. The problem is further compounded by the lack of extant research exploring drills’ long-term mental health effects. The researchers argue that the lack of uniformity in the drills can add more agony to students who are already terrorized. They are further likely to increase apprehension and fear among children regarding the occurrence of an actual shooting and even increase the risk of trauma.
The current article is based on research conducted to provide empirical evidence on the long-term and overall mental health effects of drills involving school shootings and their effects. The researchers applied stringent, evidence-based machine learning and time series analysis of social media posts containing mental health-relevant phrases. ElSherief et al. (2021) focus on posts made by local school communities before and after drills and compare the findings using control and groups through a triangulation process. According to the findings, the researchers concluded that school shooter drills do not seek to cause trauma or crises. In its place, the drills aim to adequately prepare the staff, children, and teachers to countenance a traumatizing event that involves an actual shooter on campus. The outcomes are based on a large and diverse sample that provides empirical support that children will suffer damaging psychological consequences occasioned by school shootings involving unregulated drills.
‌ The study provides an extensive analysis of the impacts of school shootings by focusing on prescription antidepressants, which constitute central indicators of mental health in children and adolescents. The work by Rossin-Slater et al. (2020) is based on examining the impact occasioned by 44 shooting occurrences at primary and secondary institutions across the United States. The study employs an empirical plan of comparing the number of antidepressant prescriptions written by providers divided into two groups. The groups are defined by the distance from the school, with the first group comprising providers within a range of 0 to 5 miles and the second group placed 10 to 15 miles away (Rossin-Slater et al., 2020). The nature of the study mandates the work to be conducted using a quasi-random approach such that the timing of school shootings mimics a natural experiment. In such a way, the study adds to the existing studies based on natural experiments to investigate the effect of violence on children that focus on other areas of effect apart from mental health, such as behavioral outcomes and short-term educational results.
The study leverages large-scale prescription data to establish that local exposure to fatal school shootings results in a notable and tenacious surge in antidepressant use among American children and adolescents. Rossin-Slater et al. (2020) further argue that school shootings may cause varied effects on children’s mental health compared to other kinds of violence. In the same way, the children and adolescents at risk of school shootings may suffer differentially especially given the direct relationship they share with the accompanied by the loss of a sense of security at school. Rossin-Slater et al. (2020) also conclude that deadly school shootings affect the students’ mental health even as they may have been exposed to violence outside the school. Once such a child is exposed to a single, fatal school shooting, they will probably suffer lasting mental health problems that can lead to chronic mental health sicknesses.
Riehm et al. (2021) conducted research on the understanding that adolescent internalizing problems are strongly correlated with subsequent adverse results in maturity. The description formed the basis of the study to identify factors with a high vulnerability prevalence that lead to more danger of internalizing problems amongst youngsters. Riehm et al. (2021) indicate that numerous factors have been advanced to justify the increasing internalizing problem trends. The researchers single out the increased exposure to violence in school settings and worry about school shootings. They state that school shootings attract massive publicity to the extent that just knowing that they may occur will sway youths’ perceptions of safety at the school, which could be troubling. Accordingly, the proposed study hypothesized that children reporting more significant anxiety, nervousness, and stress associated with school violence or shootings would likely be depressed, anxious, and manifest hysteria at a six-month follow-up.
The study established that some adolescents in the sample declared feeling highly or extremely concerned, apprehensive, and stressed regarding a shooting or violent occasion at school. After six months, students expected to report higher chances of meeting borderline or clinical benchmarks for panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder were highly concerned about school violence or shootings. Riehm et al. (2021) established this remained the case even after adjusting for other intervening factors. However, race and ethnicity affected the strength of some of these associations, as findings indicated that Black adolescents were highly concerned. Riehm et al. (2021) advocate using population-based intervention strategies due to the high ratio of adolescents who registered their concerns about school violence or shootings. The study indicates that tiered, school-based services may offer all students universally acceptable mental health promotion agendas. Other helpful programs involve targeted interventions and counseling for children needing assistance.
Conclusion
School shootings are common occurrences in the country with traumatic effects. They attract wide publicity with more focus centered on the dead victims. Surviving kids are not featured appropriately, and research shows that they, too, get affected by mental health. The students suffer damaging psychological consequences even from drills of school shootings. Exposure to fatal school shootings will most likely cause lasting mental health problems that can lead to the development of chronic mental health sicknesses that will increase their use of antidepressants.
References
Clayborne, Z. M., Varin, M., & Colman, I. (2019). Systematic review and meta-analysis: Adolescent depression and long-term psychosocial outcomes. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 58(1), 72–79. Web.
‌ ElSherief, M., Saha, K., Gupta, P., Mishra, S., Seybolt, J., Xie, J., O’Toole, M., Burd-Sharps, S., & De Choudhury, M. (2021). Impacts of school shooter drills on the psychological well-being of American K-12 school communities: A social media study. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1). Web.
Keyes, K. M., Gary, D., O’Malley, P. M., Hamilton, A., & Schulenberg, J. (2019). Recent increases in depressive symptoms among US adolescents: trends from 1991 to 2018. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 54. Web.
Riehm, K. E., Mojtabai, R., Adams, L. B., Krueger, E. A., Mattingly, D. T., Nestadt, P. S., & Leventhal, A. M. (2021). Adolescents’ concerns about school violence or shootings and association with depressive, anxiety, and panic symptoms. JAMA Network Open, 4(11), e2132131. Web.
‌Rossin-Slater, M., Schnell, M., Schwandt, H., Trejo, S., & Uniat, L. (2020). Local exposure to school shootings and youth antidepressant use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(38), 23484–23489. Web.