PATH Focuses on Teens Under Stress

Dozens of educators, community leaders and parents filled the Strongbow Inn conference center on Tuesday as PATH hosted its annual teen health conference.

Every seminar presented by PATH (A Positive Approach to Teen Health) focuses on a relevant topic in the landscape of teen health. This year's conference -- "American Teens in Crisis: Teens Under Stress" -- focus on the high levels of stress teenagers face and the often negative ways with which that stress is handled.

"We do the conference every year because we know the trends and those high-risk issues with teens change; every year there's something different," PATH Executive Director Donna Golob said. "There's no way you can hit all of those topics in one afternoon or one day, but to anticipate people taking more time than that out of their schedules is just unrealistic. So what we do each is year just bring a very specific topic and very expert speakers to those topics that can bring relevant information that our educators and parents can take and use."

Tuesday's conference last all day and included breakfast and lunch from Strongbow. This year's expert speakers included Portage Chief of Police Troy Williams; School City of Hobart Superintendent Dr. Peggy Bluffton; suicide prevention counselor Britta Neinast, LCSW; Great Lake Labs CEO Michelle Volk; Todd Willis of Porter-Starke Services; Jasynda Radanovich of Indiana Prevention Resource Center; and Brian Harvey, Project Director for the Horizon arm of PATH.

In addition to the speakers, booth were set up with information and favors from Porter-Starke Services; the Portage Police Department; the Community Action Drug Coalition of Porter County; Great Lakes Labs; Kaufmann Chiropractic; the Indiana Counseling Association; Empower Porter County; and the Porter County Abuse Council.

Many topics that face teenagers -- such as drugs, alcohol and sex -- were discussed, but the overall theme of the conference was teen stress and how to help combat it.

"We try to focus on what current topics are affecting our adolescent teen community," said Bethany Thomas, Communications Manager at PATH. "This year, we found out that there was a new study published by the American Psychology Association that talked about that teens are under more stress than they've ever been before ... they're just as stressed as adults, but they're not coping well. They don't recognize that they're stressed and they don't know the skills to help."

She added, "We're trying here at this conference to give our attendees that information and real solutions for the attendees to go back into their schools, their communities, even their homes to make positive change."

The aim of PATH's conferences is the provide solutions that those in attendance can easily and quickly implement.

"I go to a lot of conferences and a lot of times you take a lot of notes and it's really great, then you put it in your folder and you go back to work and life takes over," Golob said. "While it was great information, you don't really do anything with it. Our goal for these conferences is to give them something they can immediately put into practice in the work they do with the youth. Our goal, really, is that I want them from each session to take away one 'aha' moment."

"Our teens are under such an enormous amount of stress and they're acting out in all kinds of different ways. It just needs to be something where we as a community recognize that we need to do something about that to help these kids." Golob ended.

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