Mental health has spiraled into a nationwide crisis, especially for young people.
On Strike! speaks with local high school student activists Natalya, Charlotte, and Fatra, who organized alongside Kshama Sawant’s socialist City Council office and a movement of hundreds of other students, socialists, and union members to demand $20 million in funding for student mental health services in 2023 by increasing the city’s Amazon Tax – and they won. We also speak with educator and union member Adam Ziemkowski, who was a lead organizer in Kshama Sawant’s socialist City Council office for a decade, and has played a crucial role in many victories, including the fight for mental health services in 2023, as well as winning the original Amazon Tax victory in 2020.
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Nearly 20 percent of high school students - one in five - report serious thoughts about suicide, and nearly one in ten report a suicide attempt. This has gone hand in hand with a frightening increase in gun violence affecting young people. Since 2017, gun deaths have become the leading cause of death among people under 25, with a major increase since the start of the COVID pandemic.
In Seattle, where On Strike! is filmed, young people are facing both these crises – mental health and gun violence. Just last month, a 17-year-old Garfield High School student Amarr Murphy-Paine was tragically gunned down outside during the school lunch hour. Seattle’s Democratic Party political establishment and their mouthpieces, like the Seattle Times, have been cynically trying to exploit this latest school shooting by insisting that cops need to be brought back into schools. So young people are continuing to fight back and get organized to demand action – mental health support and fully-funded public schools, NOT COPS.
Seattle’s corporate Democratic Mayor Bruce Harrell and all-Democrat City Council are refusing to hire social workers and mental health counselors for Seattle’s public school students, even though the money is already there as a result of last year’s victory of increasing the annual Amazon Tax.
Watch to hear how the students are also connecting their struggles to the other urgent questions facing working people, like how to end the genocidal war on Gaza and build the strongest vote against both Biden and Trump in November and for Jill Stein.
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