Knoxville leaders create youth mental health guide with hopes to help teens and kids in the area

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) – The City of Knoxville met with community leaders for good ways to address mental health for kids and teenagers. One way to help is youth mental health guides that will be accessible to all.

“We’re able to create a guide specifically for them. When you go to most of these places, you’ll find guides for senior citizens, they have guides for families but where is that guide where youth can have access, where it’s something specified for them specifically for them,” said Brianna Hanson.

Hanson is part of Mayor Kincannon’s Youth Empowerment Committee. The city holds a quarterly Community Empowerment round table and their main discussion this time focused on these guides.

They’ll have a little bit of everything, like how to how to support their mental health and recognizing when they need help.

“The community partners that we’re working with to develop these guides are, you know, mental health professionals and so some of the language maybe that we’re all using to put these together, may not be exactly right for elementary school kids,” Emily Norris, the city’s youth engagement manager said. “Just making sure that we’re making these really approachable was really important.”

Mental health education has become a big topic over the last few years. Community members like Hanson said kids should start learning at a young age.

“That’s the one thing they’re always saying, we need to go talk to somebody, we need that help, we need to, you know, deal with our frustrations of being homeless and being stigmatized and marginalized,” Hanson said.

The guides are designed for kids in elementary school all the way up to young adults in college. They are looking for ways to make the books easy to read and still leave an impact.

“Just to get some more support around mental health and so something that was accessible for young people, but also something that they would want to read through,” Norris said. “It’s going to combine both contents that they would be useful for them as well as artwork to make it a little bit more interesting and more relatable.”

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