TryHealth Curriculum Supplement
As Seen on Boston's ABC-TV News Affiliate
Personal Health
Interpersonal Health
Community Health
About TryHealth
Featured on Boston's ABC-TV News Affiliate, TryHealth serves as a curriculum supplement to the existing Health Education courses taught in high schools across America.
TryHealth was designed to meet both the Massachusetts and National Comprehensive Health Education standards, while broadening students' knowledge on mental health and emotional wellbeing.
TryHealth empowers students to overcome stigma, seek treatment and utilize healthy coping mechanisms before experiencing crisis. TryHealth provides students with tools necessary to cope with stress and mental illness within themselves, others and their community.
Emerging Legislation
Emerging Legislation: In 2016, LEAD worked with Senator Jennifer Flanagan to propose Bill. S.2112 (formerly S.2114) to the Massachusetts Legislature, promoting social & emotional learning and mental health education in high schools. If passed, this bill will encourage 700 high schools to incorporate TryHealth-inspired frameworks into existing health classes. Since TryHealth is designed to meet national and state health education frameworks, it has exciting potential for scalability and widespread adoption.
Today, Massachusetts State Representative Natalie Higgins is continuing the effort to push the bill through the MA Legislature. We are grateful to have these political leaders on our side of the fight!
What differentiates TryHealth?
Today, there are ZERO health classes taught in American high schools that give equal time to physical and mental health, making TryHealth unique and in high-demand. Current health education classes neglect mental health topics due to state frameworks that have been outdated for 20-50 years. TryHealth addresses physical and mental health and is intended to change behavior patterns that will last into adulthood, providing measurable results for school districts.
TryHealth empowers students to:
Identify signs and symptoms of mental illness.
Utilize self-care and stress management strategies.
Gain self-advocacy skills to connect themselves and peers to appropriate support
Schools currently piloting TryHealth have shown significant increases in care-seeking behaviors, self-advocacy skills, and self-care strategies utilized by youth, supporting prior studies of social & emotional learning. In addition to piloting in Leominster, MA for one year to over sixty students, LEAD intends to pilot TryHealth in five additional schools in Fall 2018.
Meet our 2018-2020 Piloting Partners!
Online HealthLab
TryHealth's complimentary online platform, HealthLab, features screening tools, resources, and blended-learning for students, parents and educators. HealthLab enables students to find treatment and support in their communities while maximizing learning.
HealthLab provides schools with accessible and effective screening tools and resources for students. Former studies have proven mental illness screening saves school districts up to $416.90 per student per year, for every successful linkage to a care provider.
Pilot with LEAD!
TryHealth is currently piloting in three health education classes at Leominster High School. Leominster is a city in central Massachusetts with alarmingly high suicide and substance use rates for adolescents. It is also the former high school of LEAD's founders and where Boston's ABC-TV WCVB Chronicle episode was filmed.
The 900-page curriculum has been evaluated, improved, and condensed into a curriculum guide for health teachers. It will be published and available for purchase beginning Fall of 2020. Until that time, it will be piloted in at least five more high schools and all data collected will be used to further improve the toolkit.
To coincide with TryHealth, LEAD provides participating schools with training for health educators to safely and effectively discuss mental illness in the classroom. Health educators will also be able to subscribe to online resources, test banks and videos. Participating schools will utilize HealthLab, LEAD's online research and validation component designed to study adolescent mental illness.
