Some community groups and mental health experts are suggesting a mental health addition to the state’s anti-drug curriculum set to roll out on school campuses this year.
This past June, a new rule known as Tucker’s Law (House Bill 3908) was passed, requiring that taxpayer-funded public schools teach a yearly lesson regarding fentanyl and drug abuse awareness.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, this law was named after a 19-year-old who died from fentanyl poisoning. Tucker Roe reportedly thought the pill he illicitly purchased online in 2021 was Percocet.
“While Tucker’s Law is named in honor of my son, it isn’t for my son. It’s for every living son and daughter across Texas,” Tucker’s mother, Stefanie Turner, said upon the bill’s signing.
Yet some mental health advocates have raised concerns that the new program, which targets students in grades 6-12, is skipping over an important facet of education on drug use: mental health.
Anti-drug campaigns have had lackluster results in the past, such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program launched in the 1980s. Several studies found that while it taught students about drugs, it wasn’t effective at preventing drug use.
The program emphasized empowering students to stand up to peer pressure and employ better decision-making skills. Yet some researchers suggested adolescent drug use is not linked to rational thought and is instead related to poor self-esteem.
Several factors are believed to play a role in increasing a teen’s risk of using illicit substances, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention citing family history of drug use, absence of parental monitoring, and mental health issues among them.
If the new anti-drug curriculum launched this year aims to have more success than those deployed before it, taking these factors into account is essential, according to some mental health experts.
“Kids have to understand why they are buying pills in the first place,” explained Kathleen Hassenfratz, a licensed professional counselor, according to The Texas Tribune.
“Substance use disorder is one type of mental health problem, and when you have one problem of this type, you are more likely to have other problems in the same area,” she added.
Hassenfratz also noted that some children may not know how to tell if they are struggling with a mental health disorder.
“It has become kind of cool to be able to say you have something even though they haven’t been clinically diagnosed,” suggested Hassenfratz.
“You can be sad, but depression is a whole different thing,” Hassenfratz added. “One is a clinical issue and we need to teach the students the difference because a lot of kids are just self-diagnosing.”
Hassenfratz is also on the board of the Austin-based nonprofit Engage and Heal Foundation, a group that formed in 2019 to raise mental health awareness.
The group aims to get a mental health component added to Tucker’s Law when lawmakers meet for the upcoming special session expected to be scheduled this fall.
As previously covered in The Dallas Express, the special session will consider school choice legislation.
The mental health of young people in the U.S. has been at the forefront of recent public health conversations, especially following the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, public health authorities qualified the state of youth mental health as a national emergency, with a marked increase in depression, anxiety, and self-harm reported across the country.