Treating Depression within a Supportive Educational Environment

As the founder of the Greenbrier Academy for Girls, L. Jay Mitchell provides direction to a West Virginia-based school that provides therapeutic assistance to teens with emotional and behavioral problems. L. Jay Mitchell’s institution has had lasting effects with helping girls cope with symptoms of depression and regain a sense of hope and joy in the process.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of American, nearly 25 percent of teen girls nationwide exhibit symptoms of depression. Many over-consume social media, and they often feel inadequate in their own bodies and dislike their weight and appearance. As a result, they can start to hate themselves and one another. Each girl’s experience in learning to manage depression reflects her own life journey and the pressures and anxieties that she feels. There is no one-size-fits-all method for treating depression, but studies demonstrate that a positive environment and a caring community play a critical role in improving teen mental health.

Greenbrier’s approach focuses on instilling a sense of belonging and encouraging personal growth, no matter how challenging it might seem at first. With support from staff and peers, girls can learn to trust those around them and feel secure in their own bodies, rather than striving for perfection. The school puts an emphasis on creating a caring and therapeutic environment where young women can gain confidence in themselves and find a level of self-love that prevents others’ negative opinions from bringing them down.

 

The Contextual Nature of Virtue as an Interpersonal Trait

Guiding Greenbrier Academy for Girls in West Virginia, L. Jay Mitchell informs a therapeutic boarding school that provides a safe, supportive environment to young women for regaining a sense of balance and confidence. One of the core attributes emphasized at the school L. Jay Mitchell oversees is “virtue.”

Defined in general terms, virtue represents an act or quality that works to promote the “greater good” in a lasting way. Examples of this include behaviors that are helpful, honest, forgiving, compassionate, and dependable. In many cases, virtue is contextually defined, as behaviors that would not be tolerated in one situation are acceptable in another. For example, while skipping class is generally not virtuous, it is viewed as normal in when undertaken in response to the passing of a loved one.

Within the context of learning at Greenbrier Academy, when one girl passes in confidence information about her personal struggles to another, she assumes that it will not be shared with others. Respecting this request builds trust and serves as a virtue. On the other hand, when that girl confides that she is harming herself through cutting as a way of relieving internal pain, virtue shifts to placing safety as a core value over interpersonal relations. Thus, informing a trusted adult such as a nurse becomes the virtuous action.

Teen Depression and a Proliferation of Social Media Expectations

Based in West Virginia, L. Jay Mitchell owns Greenbrier Academy for Girls and provides direction, oversight, and training at the therapeutic boarding school that assists young women in overcoming trauma. One common question among parents considering placing their offspring in L. Jay Mitchell’s school is why their teen daughters experience depression.

Unfortunately, the prevalence of social media apps, accessible at any time, has made it increasingly challenging for teen girls to maintain a positive self-image. Unrealistic body expectations and a competitive online ecosystem have left many teens with an inner feeling of emptiness and being alone. These troubled teens are not receiving the support and knowledge they need to manage unrealistic messaging and pressures delivered via social media proactively. This trend is reflected in a Journal of Abnormal Psychology study that uncovered an increase by more than 50 percent of major depression symptoms among teens over the past decade.

The positive news is that boarding schools such as Greenbrier Academy offer an ideal environment for unplugging from the digital environment and working to regain self-esteem and a sense of self-worth. Peer support is combined with family, group, and individual therapy sessions featuring individually assigned staff therapists and can help achieve lasting healing. 

Relationship-Focused Communication as a Greenbrier Academy Value

A longtime educational leader, L. Jay Mitchell oversees Greenbrier Academy for Girls (GBA), a therapeutic boarding school in Southeastern West Virginia, as its founder and owner. L. Jay Mitchell designed the school to provide young women who have experienced trauma with an opportunity to develop self-esteem and a positive sense of connection with others.

To this end, GBA instills healing and empowering intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships between adolescent girls and their families. This entails a combination of mentorship and advanced therapeutics, as well as the application of critical thinking in academic and group settings. Moreover, the approach not only engages the intellect, but it also involves an experiential component and focuses on developing a social conscience through “relationship-focused words and actions,” whether in counseling sessions or through classroom conversations.

The aim of this emphasis on relationality, or relational communication, is to “[live] more virtuously.” Reflecting this communication-focused mandate, GBA administrators and educators, who offer a combination of innate understanding and advanced professional training, are generally altruistic and have high moral standards. 

Greenbrier Academy Can Help Parents Understand Introverted Teens

At Greenbrier Academy for Girls in West Virginia, founder and owner L. Jay Mitchell and his team have created one of the nation’s leading non-acute therapeutic boarding schools whose approach is distinctly student-centered. Built around the therapeutic model of applied relationality that L. Jay Mitchell developed in collaboration with Dr. Brent D. Slife, the school works to provide enriching academics and creative experiences as part of its emphasis on helping girls to overcome destructive beliefs based on a false sense of self and others.

Greenbrier Academy’s staff members get to know students and encourage them to engage in a variety of constructive, empowering activities that include equestrian experiences and therapeutic drumming circles. The team understands that each young woman has a core identity and works to help them overcome whatever obstacles are holding them back.

That said, many parents become concerned if their daughters seem to be introverted, believing that it goes hand in hand with conditions such as depression or that it is tied to outcomes like school and social failure. Parents who may themselves be more extroverted may also feel alienated from an introverted child.

Greenbrier’s team can provide reassurance for families, helping them determine whether signs of introversion are a natural and normal part of their daughter’s personality or if there are underlying traumas and problems that need to be addressed. The school has developed a special understanding of best practices involved in working with introverted teens and in helping them and their families achieve greater mutual understanding and appreciation.

While introversion as a personality trait is not a cause for alarm, there are a few warning signs that professional help may be needed to deal with deeper issues. Teens may isolate themselves in their rooms for long periods of time, interact with others solely online, refuse to engage in any way with new people in their life, or use solitary activities as an escape from real-world problems.

Disconnecting Explicit and Implicit Memories Creates Emotional Trauma

Since 2007, L. Jay Mitchell has guided the West Virginia-based therapeutic boarding school Greenbrier Academy for Girls as its founder and owner. Among L. Jay Mitchell’s areas of knowledge in this field is emotional trauma and its causal mechanisms, the processes that produce specific outcomes. His theories on this subject include how disturbances to the hippocampus and memory association can cause emotional trauma.

Although emotional trauma has connections to psychological conditions such as anxiety, depression, isolation, and addiction, its causations are distinctive. One mechanism that creates it involves disconnections between the two types of memories: explicit and implicit.

Explicit memories are tied to the workings of the hippocampus and encompass conscious memories that can be ordered chronologically, which provides narrative meaning and enables a person to see connections between life events. Aspects of these events can be recalled without also reliving sensations and emotions associated with it. Those sensations and feelings make up implicit memories, consisting of emotions, perceptions, bodily sensations, behaviors, mental models, and priming. Unlike explicit memories, they are not consciously retrievable and seem to arrive randomly, with triggers beyond a person’s understanding.

A healthy mind can make associations between explicit and implicit memories, allowing for context and rationale. However, people with emotional trauma might experience a severance of the memory types. Feelings of depression or anxiety might appear for no apparent reason. Separation of implicit and explicit memories is a product of intense stress levels that generate excessive stress hormones and disrupt the functions of the hippocampus. Emotional trauma is often a result.

The objective of therapeutic treatment is to reconnect the parts of the distinct memory systems that became disengaged. By restoring links between explicit and implicit memories, people who have experienced trauma can take the first steps toward becoming emotionally whole again.