Maria Carrillo High School students team with mental health professionals for Santa Rosa Marathon booth on cyberbullying

Instead of passing out water to runners at the Santa Rosa Marathon this weekend, a group of mental health professionals and high school students will be manning booths to combat the rise of cyberbullying.

The team, led by Dr. Anish Shah from Siyan Clinical, a psychiatric and behavioral health facility based in Santa Rosa, has teamed with Maria Carrillo High School Students in the Red Cross Club to bring awareness to the impact of cyberbullying on youth mental health.

Shah, a licensed psychiatrist and founder of Siyan Clinical, has focused much of his recent research on cyberbullying after finding little available on the topic.

His own personal area of research is clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. When looking at cyberbullying, he said there was a direct, negative effect on these mental health conditions when patients had also experienced some form of online bullying.

“There are challenges about each study and how they define cyberbullying, so the statistics are very broad,” Shah said.

The data show that between 14% and 58% of youth will experience cyberbullying in their lifetime, Shah said. But for kids who identify within the LGBTQ+ spectrum, that number jumps to 71%.

“That's a very high number of a subpopulation that is impacted,” Shah said. “It’s very, very alarming.”

For youth who have mental health diagnoses, the impact of a hateful online comment can be substantial.

Shah has seen trends of increasing mental health issues, decreasing academic performance, rising substance abuse, and feelings of guilt, shame and low self-esteem among young people.

“When I see these children, it sounds like the families are also sort of helpless about ways to help their children,” Shah said. “I think we need to do a lot of work.”

Being a father to two teens brings the issue even closer to home, he said. His oldest daughter, a senior at Maria Carrillo and president of the Red Cross Club, is a part of Siyan’s initiative against cyberbullying and is also passionate about mental health.

Solving the issue will need multitiered solutions, Shah said, including fostering relationships among parents and their children, parents and teachers, and repairing children’s relationships with one another.

“Most importantly, we don’t want to leave out a big elephant in the room – it's about accountability with social media companies,” Shah said.

Siyan Clinical mental health professionals typically attend the marathon to pass out information about their resources – including guidance on medication management, psychotherapy, substance abuse treatment and more. This is the first year they will have a booth specifically dedicated to cyberbullying.

Shah hopes that staffing the booth with local high school students will help the community hear from youth closest to the issue.

“I wanted to show our children (how to) appeal to our community directly about what's going on and what needs to be done,” Shah said. “Let’s have everyone hear from the children themselves.”

His daughter Siya Shah will be at the booth this weekend along with other club members to talk to runners and marathon attendees about what cyberbullying in today’s age actually looks like.

“I think usually when adults talk about cyberbullying, obviously there's like a generational difference,” Siya said. “And even though I think people understand what it is, I don't think they've experienced it in the same way or seen the true harm.”

She hopes that this weekend’s marathon could be a way to begin alerting the community of the issue and to help teenagers identify cyberbullying before they post online.

“In the worst-case scenario, suicides do happen. It’s a very real thing,” Siya said.

“I think also with teenagers, (including) the actual perpetrators who actually do cyberbullying, I don't think they necessarily realize what they're doing is that bad,” Siya said. “You don't really realize that people who do get cyberbullied become suicidal or extremely depressed or have anxiety and don't go to school because they don't want to face that student in real life.”

Report For America corps member Adriana Gutierrez covers education and child welfare issues for The Press Democrat. Reach her at Adriana.Gutierrez@PressDemocrat.com.