Narrator: Funding for this program is provided by Idaho's Millennium Fund.

The Friends of Idaho Public Television and the Idaho Public Television Endowment.

Jillian: You know, when I'm going through something sad.

All right.

About something happy.

All right about it.

I have a very long family history of mental illness.

My mother, her bipolar and depression led her to not being the best mom.

It was just not a very safe and stable environment.

Growing up.

When she was high, she wasn't a good parent.

She was incapable of taking care of me and my sister.

She was like a ticking time bomb.

I saw my mom and I decided that I would do everything in my power to not be like her.

I wish adults knew that kids can have adult problems.

You know, we do struggle with very adult things.

And I also wish they knew that we're not choosing these things.

People my age, we're not choosing to be depressed.

We're not choosing to have these problems.

We're all just doing our best.

I wish they knew that what their experiences growing up are not similar to ours at all.

There's so many environmental factors in play that are very different.

It is very, very easy to access drugs in this day and age.

I think people are finally starting to realize just how extreme the situation is.

David Gomez: Right now for Idaho and in small town, anywhere you go, parents would not comprehend the percentage of kids that are vaping.

Jillian: Everyone vapes if they were to go after every student who does it, they would have to go after the entire school.

Gomez: And once you start vaping and get that nicotine addiction, it's easy to pick up a marijuana joint.

It's easy to get a prescription pill addiction.

Allison Tate: Drugs that are available are constantly changing counterfeit prescription drugs that may have fentanyl in them.

John Condie: We have kids who respond quite dramatically and at times in life, threatening to talk to alcohol.

These illicit substances literally rewire the brain in a way that could be there for decades to come.

Depression, anxiety, suicide, self-harm have all been on the rise since 2007.

Megan Smith: The most recent Mental Health America ranks Idaho 49 out of 50 states for youth mental health.

Tate: I think kids are self-medicating.

I think kids are more solitary.

Condie: I think that the mental health crisis is driving the substance abuse.

Randy Jensen: We started seeing kids having more and more mental health problems.

And oftentimes that correlated with drug and alcohol abuse.

Together.

And then in about a year's time, we had a couple of student suicides and.

And that was really hard.

Condie: The adolescent brain is chaotic enough, but adding an exodus neurotransmitter like substance, it's a recipe for cognitive, behavioral and psychological disaster.

Tate: It's certainly easier to make bad choices.

Now, you don't have to leave your bedroom to connect with bad people.

Smith: The earlier they start.

Substance use, the harder their entire life with substances will be.

Condie: Adolescence defined as starting around 11 or 12, usually finishing up in the late teens or early 20s.

This is a very dynamic time of the brain.

There is a lot of organizing, maturing, and molding going on in the frontal part of the brain, and it's that frontal part of the brain that is going to determine that adolescence, personality, goals, empathy, drive, who they are for the rest of their life.

Long term happiness is going to be dependent on appropriate development during this time.

When an adolescent starts to experiment or use illicit and chemically addictive substances, they give them immediate chemical reward in their brain, and they're going to cause these reward system synapses to fire, which means they're going to potentiate and grow and strengthen.

But the major cause of this substance abuse is the problems our kids are having with mental health.

At the same time that digital media, video game, social media became 24 over seven accessible on the smartphone, and that represents a seismic shift on what our adolescent kids are doing in their free time.

If we want our kids to grow up to be happy, we have to care about their development.

Smith: We are not going to treat ourselves out of this problem.

I always think of it as those old arcade games where you're bopping the alligators heads and there's like bop, bop, bop and then just keep coming.

But we have to get to a point where we're not just chasing alligator heads, where we're considering what's happening before that, can we start preventing it rather than just responding to the crisis?

How do we make this the best possible place for kids?

Jillian: Just come from a place of understanding and, you know, answer questions, give them resources, really just show your care and how much you want them to be safe and healthy and, you know, be able to have resources that aren't drugs.

Tate: The idea until very recently was we need to get kids and families into the system to get them help.

And we know that for most kids, the juvenile justice system does not provide better outcomes for them.

There are some kids that need to be there, but there's a lot of kids that don't.

If we can take the behavior, look at the underlying causes of the behavior and help the whole family, we're going to have a much better result than if the youth was just brought into the system and treated like a bad kid, and then the family gets caught in the system.

Anyone can refer someone to the bridge.

54% of our referrals come from law enforcement.

About 20% is from schools.

So that might be school counselors or teachers.

Community organizations.

We get walk ins.

It could be any kids.

They're exhibiting behavioral issues in school.

They've been caught with the marijuana vape in the restroom at school.

And the school resource officer says, let's give them another chance.

Let's see if we can refer them to the bridge rather than taking them to detention.

Charging the youth with a crime, kicking the youth out of school if they've caught their own children with drugs or alcohol and think, okay, I don't want to call the police, but I also don't want to do nothing, you know?

But I don't know what to do.

That's a great family to just reach out to the center.

The goal is to keep kids out of both the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system by providing community resources, keeping the kids in the community.

Some families are just living in a chaotic environment, and it's hard for them to help their children even when they want to, even when they love their children, they just need that assistance.

If we as a community could, without charging people, without criticizing people, without prosecuting people, if we could provide those resources, I think we would just be in a much better spot.

Jillian: Counseling needs to be more accessible, because even if you're not in a state of crisis or you're not dealing with severe mental illness, it can just be helpful.

Just getting a trusted adult to help guide you, would just be helpful for so many different people.

Randy Jensen: In the city of American Falls, we have about 5000 people, close to 9000 people in the county.

We have about 1600 students in our school district.

It's a real diverse community.

It's a really close knit community.

I've lived in American Falls for 40 years with my wife.

I've raised my family here, and I love this community, and I love the people in this community.

The best way for a school district to start addressing drug abuse issues really is in a community effort, especially in a small town.

They really rely on the school district to be the leader in that.

We have a real philosophy here that the best way to help a child is to help their family.

Stronger families, stronger children.

First thing we did is we passed a higher school levy, which allowed us to make sure we had a counselor in every school, but then we wanted to make sure that every student had access to more extensive counseling.

If they needed, whether it was for mental health counseling, for anxiety, for drug abuse.

The benefits of partnering with a company like here, Solis, is they have the connections to make it happen really fast.

So quite often we have people that get within counseling within a month through our district at 1600 students is about $7,000.

So it just as a is a bargain.

This will be our third year and it grows every year.

I mean, every year I hear more and more success stories.

Parents calling me saying, we are so grateful for the counseling our child has received.

I believe that when kids know they have a future, when they can look just beyond today and and they have learned skills to do fun things, they're just going to be less likely to turn to substance abuse.

The rest of my life will be dedicated to making sure here in American Falls, we can have the highest quality of life we can for our families.

Jillian: I've turned kind of my trauma and that serve as a motivator to get better and to not be like, you know, my family members and I, I treat everything like a learning experience.

Everything gives you an opportunity to learn and grow.

Marco Erickson: Community.

Youth in action is a vision of what we should be doing across the entire nation.

Drug prevention is a core of our mission, so that's always a part of what we do.

It's important leadership, community service, getting out there and serving our community because when you're needed, you feel wanted.

The second part is our live teen center, where enrichment activities and daily community service opportunities to connect with each other in a really controlled environment that's safe and healthy for them.

We get them from all kinds of backgrounds you can imagine.

We've got rich kids, poor kids.

We've got the kids, have drug user parents.

Everything we do is free.

And guess what?

It's cheaper than waiting till they're in jail.

Or they're failing in school, or they're in the Health and Welfare system because their families not working well together.

What happens is all the money gets diverted towards treatment and problems after they've occurred.

And we can serve 200 children or youth for that same cause.

And that's the beauty of prevention.

We stop it before it happens.

So everything we do every day is to give that next kid that next level of hope.

They're beautiful souls who have been put into rough situations, and they don't always know how to navigate it.

Jillian: It is very, very easy to access drugs and other substances, and I believe that it's easier than it ever has been before.

Snapchat.

Telegram.

People will imagine getting drugs that go to a shady street corner, talk to this weird guy in all black, and it's like, no, just pick up your phone and be like, hey, I want this.

How much?

Kelli Rich: A lot of kids are feeling like they're not enough.

Like they're not important.

Like they don't have friends not knowing their worth.

And then they go to things like substance abuse to feel better.

I wanted to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner so I could help the youth with mental health, but that's a three year program.

But what can I do now?

Welcome to Save My Family.

Thank you so much for coming and for loving your kids and wanting to learn about their lives.

Being a parent is very hard, but there are so many things coming at them from all sides.

If we can get parents trained on how to build their families stronger and help their kids and their relationships, then their kids are going to have this innate ability to be stronger.

Lisa Conde: I really didn't know, like, how easy it was to get drugs on Snapchat.

And I think some of the stuff has is like common sense, but it's just being able to implement it in the home.

Rich: We encourage them to start with 1 or 2 things.

The number one thing that I say, because it's easy for us to do, is to have family dinners go over their day and show that we care, walk them through scenarios where they're approached or offered drugs, and we can help them with what to say and when to leave.

The next thing is going outside and getting exercise, and we give ideas of what to do to serve and places to find service opportunities.

Summer Johnson: I think 100% of parents should go to an event like this.

Rich: Start with your family.

Do the most that you can do with your family to make it strong.

And then if we can get to our neighborhood, to our city, to our state, you know it can be bigger.

But let's start small.

Jillian: Instead of assuming things and coming up with an answer on your own, simply ask the teens you're working with.

You have no way of knowing what they truly need without directly asking them.

Amy Bartoo: Idaho Drug for youth started at Coeur d'Alene High School in 1991.

The concept was that kids were making a commitment to be drug and alcohol and tobacco free.

They wanted to separate themselves from what the other kids who were getting in trouble and getting the attention of law enforcement and school administration.

In 1994, we started the first Idaho Youth Summit to bring all these kids together from different parts of the state.

It's truly a leadership camp with drug and alcohol prevention information woven throughout, because that's what we want them to leave with, is a confidence to be drug and alcohol free.

Jeff Gray: I love this place.

This is like one of the most important places I can think of.

Bartoo: I met Jeff Gray when he came to a leadership retreat.

Having come from Genesee, Idaho.

Gray: I didn't really have anything that was anchoring me to who I was yet.

I live with my mom starting around the age of 4 or 5.

She had kind of a rough life.

She had a hard time holding down a job, so we moved a lot.

We were very poor.

We lived out of a car a lot of time.

And then she met my stepdad.

Alcohol.

It was the the core drug of choice for them.

We're actually in LA and at a hotel there.

My mother was shot by my stepdad, who then took his own life.

After a couple days in foster care and somewhere in L.A. County, I ended up with my dad and my stepmom in Genesee, Idaho.

I was suddenly in a very small town in Idaho trying to figure out how to make that work.

When I was a freshman in high school, I just kind of randomly came across.

I had a fight through a health teacher.

I just remember being at that camp and being like, this has been meaningful to me in ways that I don't really understand.

Bartoo: Kids feel such a sense of safety when they are at the Idaho Youth Summit, something that some of those kids have never felt.

We encourage them and teach them how to look at their own personal relationship with drugs and alcohol, whether they have family members who have been affected by substance use or abuse, and then also challenge their own beliefs about drugs and alcohol, and all with the hope that they can take that motivation and that energy back to their school districts to encourage other kids to join them in the effort.

Gray: I didn't need to be sold on not taking drugs.

I already thought it would only go to places, very dark places I had already been a part of.

To me, the real drug was understanding myself and understanding how to connect with people better because I could already see how much further that could take me as a person.

Bartoo: What is it that's going to help our kids the most?

They drug and alcohol free, is supplying them with caring adults.

Things that make a difference in their lives connection, trust, safety.

Those are the things that matter.

Gray: Those people are my family.

They're brothers and sisters and parents, and they are a family because they they gave you space to be who you are.

Jillian: Make them feel seen, make them feel heard, and give them other resources so they don't feel like they have to resort to substances.

Megan Smith: But the idea of upstream prevention is how do we get ahead of the problem before it starts?

When we do just a downstream response, we're always chasing the problem.

Almost all of our resources, our funding, our attention, our focus is on that downstream crisis response, the beauty of an upstream approach is it helps us get ahead of the problem.

We're not waiting for a crisis to occur.

We're actually trying to stop it before it starts.

That's introduced me to the incredible power of the Icelandic prevention approach.

The Icelandic prevention model actually treats the community as the patient rather than the individual.

It's through this community engaged effort and through this data component that we can really make change.

The first step is what we call build the coalition, where we invite literally anyone in the community to help us build the best possible community for kids.

We want grandparents there.

We want aunts, uncles, small business owners.

We want anybody who wants to be part of making that community the best possible place it can be for kids.

Cynthia Floyd: I was born and raised in Marsing, Idaho, grew up on a farm.

Here.

And have my kids and raising them here as well.

Our youth are going through something that's completely different than what we went through.

Floyd: We know our students personally.

We're a small town, so that made us come together as a community and as a school, and.

Work.

Hard at doing things to help provide care for those students.

Smith: They're empowered to say, oh, not only do we know that our depression rates are not where we want them to be, but we have all sorts of ideas about how we could start working on them, and we know how to talk about it with our other community members.

Floyd: We were able to implement doing counseling during school hours and community events to help with broadening physical activity and connectedness, to be able to provide opportunities for these students to be able to to have some coping mechanisms.

Smith: I'm not asking them to go spend a bunch of money or learn a bunch of new things, or remember some complicated steps or processes.

It's we looked at the data in your community.

The data said your kids need more connection.

Let's sit together and think of ways we can enhance connection in your community.

Floyd: Our depression rates have gone down and that's huge for us.

They were a school that started with 66% of their students at that moderate to severe depression level.

Then they went to 33 the next year and they're at 24% in three years.

It is astounding to me.

And that is just because their community just started focusing on it.

The reason why I love upstream prevention is because anybody can do it.

Smith: You don't have to be an expert at anything at all.

All of us can help a young person connect either to ourselves or to other friends.

Floyd: If we can provide that healthy connection, strengthen those families, get that communication rolling, and do that prevention in every area that we touch these students, then we will continue to thrive at mercy.

When you ask anybody in the Morrison community to step up for a kid.

The answer is always yes.

Smith: My biggest dream is to help our communities refocus on coming back together for young people, and to help our community see that there is hope.

The other thing is bringing in the importance of data.

Both of these things are totally within our grasp, and we're seeing it happen in some communities in Idaho.

And I am just I am so hopeful.

Background: Oh oh.

Smith: The power is in us coming together.

Allison Tate: There is no shame in asking for help, spending time with your kids, knowing what your kids are doing, who they're with, keeping track of prescription drugs in your home.

Condie: It's up to the generation who's been there before to find that fine line between allowing them to take risks, but not the risks that are going to ruin the rest of their lives.

Smith: Just build connection into your life.

If you have kids, build it into their lives.

If you interact with kids in any way, think about how you can build connection for them.

Gomez: Parents are the number one anti-drug.

Randy Jensen: There is building strong connections between the school and the family, and just stronger connections in the community as a whole just makes a significant difference.

We believe in helping prevent substance abuse.

Erickson: You know, a good rite of passage is staying sober and using your full potential of your brain, chasing your dreams.

Gray: If you're enabled by our organizations to have a group of people that you really trust that are going to be stoked for you to do something that you're curious about, or to try a new thing or to go a different way, then suddenly drugs aren't really valuable to you at that point.

Bartoo: Kids are our best investment when it comes to creative ideas, and if we let them loose long enough to play out their their ideas and communicate with one another, we would have a terrific momentum towards creating a drug and alcohol free youth society in the State of Idaho.

Gray: Doubled down on the idea of empowering kids by having those kids be part of these conversations.

Jillian: Once you deal with the mental health crisis that will greatly help the drug crisis, I kind of just remind myself that I have survived things that I shouldn't have.

I was just a kid, I was little, I didn't have resources, I didn't have the knowledge that I have now.

So if eight year old me could, I survived that.

If even four year old me survive, that I can survive whatever comes my way.

I have the resources, I have the strength, and I have the willpower.

Narrator: For more information and free resources to help start the journey to the unaltered state, visit the unaltered state.org.

(Music) Narrator: Funding for this program is provided by Idaho's Millennium Fund, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, and the Idaho Public Television Endowment.