3:30 P.M. Mental Health

By Jodie Morse

We've got fries!" squeals sophomore Leigh Jacobson, tearing into her family's living room with a Dairy Queen bag in hand and her sister Elizabeth in tow. The two girls can't stop giggling (about a cute boy), and Leigh rushes over to give her dog Annie a big nuzzle. "Lately," she reports, "I've been having a string of good days."

Her afternoons haven't always been so carefree. About a year ago, Leigh began feeling "down in the dumps." A diligent student, she stopped doing her homework and, instead, slept or cried away her evenings. She drifted from her childhood friends and started hanging out with an older crowd. "It was total detachment," recalls her mother Joan. "We'd keep wondering if the old Leigh was still in there." And nothing--not favorite activities like shopping at the mall or sessions with a therapist--would coax her out.

Then last January, Leigh remembers sitting in algebra class and thinking: "Today is not a good day." That afternoon she swallowed 40 pills--20 aspirin and 20 Tylenol--and was hospitalized for eight days. After having clinical depression diagnosed, she was put on the antidepressant Effexor, among other medications. "Now, instead of the peaks and valleys," she says, "I just feel small waves of emotion. Things are a lot smoother."

As many as 20% of Leigh's Webster Groves classmates currently take prescription medication to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders, according to the school's social worker, Pat Ferrugia. Nationally, an estimated 1 in 20 children and adolescents suffers from depression. While doctors have long dispensed drugs like Ritalin to children and adolescents, teen prescriptions for antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil have grown rapidly in recent years.

Accordingly, schools minister more and more to the mental health of their student bodies. At Webster Groves each student is assigned to one of the school's six guidance counselors, who keeps tabs on them for all four years. But it's those closest to students--teachers, coaches and even peers--who serve as the primary mental-health detectors. Teachers receive a checklist of the signs of adolescent depression, ranging from "lack of concentration" to "crying spells" all the way to "thoughts or plans of suicide." If a student matches the profile, teachers alert a 16-member team, led by Ferrugia, that intervenes by contacting other teachers and parents.

But Ferrugia works at the school only three days a week, and each counselor, in addition to doubling as a college adviser, must monitor more than 200 charges. Regardless of the resources pinch, there will always be some troubled kids who simply escape notice. "I call them the wallpaper kids," says nurse Buss, "those kids who will be carrying big loads, but they're so quiet nobody notices."

Some at Webster, students included, are worried that the number of kids on medication is too high. "I'm definitely seeing overmedicated students where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing," says Buss. So some simply stop taking their medication, without consulting a parent or doctor. Senior Zach Wood took himself off Paxil last spring because, he says, "I couldn't just sit on the couch and have happy pills make me feel better." Ferrugia has an even greater concern: because many seriously depressed teens at Webster get their medication directly from their primary-care physician, they never spend any time on the psychiatrist's couch talking out their issues.

In August, Leigh stopped seeing her psychiatrist. ("He made me wallow in myself," she says.) Though her grades and disposition have perked up with her medication, she still has her share of down days. What then? Instead of confiding in a doctor, she now finds solace elsewhere: "In my teachers," she says.

--J.M.