If your child’s mental health has tanked during the pandemic, there’s little comfort in knowing you’re not alone.

News reports have been sounding alarm sirens: rising numbers of suicidal children in emergency rooms, more children needing in-patient care after suicide attempts, teens and young adults suffering mental health crises at levels health professionals haven’t seen before, American students failing classes at record levels. High-achieving kids who have never struggled socially or at school are now failing, withdrawn, overwhelmed and unmotivated.

Many parents are desperate for help that has been harder to access. In talking to parents stressed about their kids’ anxiety and depression over the past year, I’ve heard how difficult it is to get a timely appointment with a therapist or psychiatrist since the demand has spiked.

“Everyone is seeing huge influxes,” said Nancy Spargo, CEO of Sparlin Mental Health in St. Louis. “We can’t hire more people because more people aren’t available.”

Instead, they have had to turn away some people seeking help.

“There’s nothing worse for a parent than not being able to help your kid, to watch your kid struggle,” she said.

Parents are also exhausted and emotionally tapped out at a time when maintaining an emotional connection with their children is critical. It’s past time for our country to invest resources in this generation’s mental health recovery.

President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief bill delivers $4.25 billion for mental health services, the largest amount behavioral health groups have received in a spending bill. But this may still be far from the amount needed to address historic levels of deteriorating mental health across the country.

Teens and young adults have been among the hardest hit in terms of mental health, so how do we help them heal?

Nance Roy, chief clinical officer at the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that works to prevent suicide among children and young adults, says the long-term mental health effects of the pandemic will ripple for the next several years. This has to be a long-term effort.

“It’s not all over once we are all vaccinated and back in school,” she said.

Schools must conduct a proper needs assessment: surveying students and parents about their mental health status and needs, destigmatizing conversations about it, and filling gaps in resources, access and training. Students need to know where they can easily access direct clinical services at school. Educators need to adjust expectations for students who will struggle as they return to the classroom structure.

Dr. Shannon Farris with the CHADS Coalition for Mental Health, a St. Louis-based nonprofit providing suicide prevention programming and crisis counseling, says the organization has continued to provide its “SOS: Signs of Suicide” prevention program to middle and high school students virtually during the pandemic. One local district decided to go even further, after a student-led survey suggested a catastrophic level of anguish. A survey done by the students at Lafayette and Marquette high schools in the Rockwood School District found that 65% of 852 students surveyed said they had considered suicide. Of 667 students asked, 160 said they had made an attempt to take their own lives.

Even in an informal student survey, these kinds of answers require an emergency response.

Students pleaded for the district to take immediate action, and school officials responded. They have also contracted with CHADS to train 16 more adults in a long-term prevention and awareness program. Farris advocates for training all the faculty and staff in a building, along with students, parents and community members. Ideally, the conversation about mental health continues long after the training ends.

It will take an all hands on deck to restore what so many adolescents have lost this past year.

“A lot of compassion and patience will go a whole, long way,” Spargo said.

NOTE: If you or someone you know needs help, text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line (741741). You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

The Gutraj family was on spring break in Memphis last year before the pandemic sparked mass shutdowns.

Like many of us, they were in a bit of denial about how dramatically life was about to change. Then, their children’s Missouri school district sent a notice that students wouldn’t be coming back to classrooms.

Within a few weeks, Valerie Gutraj began getting emails that her kids’ various summer camps were also getting canceled -- one by one. She and her husband both work full-time, so she scrambled to find a nanny for the summer. They adhered to safety guidelines, so whenever the nanny had a possible COVID exposure, she would quarantine away from them.

“(The kids) would wind up on the iPad for times that would make me cringe,” Gutraj said.

Ashley Cheatham also remembers the moment when her son’s camps canceled their sessions. Neither she nor her husband could work from home.

“In an act of desperation, I posted on Facebook that I’m basically screwed,” she said. A friend volunteered to babysit her son when she had to go to her retail job.

For working parents, summer camp is about more than their kids swimming, making crafts and hanging out with friends. It’s essential child care for children who have aged out of daycare but are too young to stay unsupervised all day.

While some camps tried to pivot to virtual programming, many were forced to cancel entirely.

The impact was felt nationally. Of the more than 15,000 camps in the U.S., 80% of overnight camps and 40% of day camps shuttered last summer, according to the American Camp Association. About 19.5 million children missed out on camp experiences.

This year, however, camp is back.

Summer camps have had more time and experience to prepare, and many are reopening with safety protocols in place or with hybrid options.

Parents may be just as ready for summer as their kids.

“I tear up thinking about my kids going back to building relationships as opposed to being little screen zombies,” Gutraj said. Cheatham is also looking forward to her son playing outdoors more. She’s keeping an eye out for affordable camp options that also have precautions in place.

Ron Heinz, owner of Code Ninjas in O’Fallon, Missouri, says he’s beginning to see business come back as parents become more comfortable with safety measures, increasing immunization rates and lower caseloads. But he has noticed that there is more hesitation to commit early this year.

“There’s a whole bunch who are waiting until it's closer,” he said. In pre-pandemic times, planning for the summer started far earlier in the year for working parents. Sada Lindsey remembers having an alert set on her calendar for the day registration opened in January last year. She would have a spreadsheet ready with the various dates and locations to cobble together a plan for the summer.

Her family ended up sharing a nanny with another family last summer after the camps shut down. This year, she is hopeful her daughter will get to have a more typical summer experience with her friends.

Jennifer Biermann spent last summer tag-teaming with her spouse while they worked from home and watched their kids, now 7 and 5. They purchased a large inflatable pool and water slides for the backyard. Biermann would sit outside working on her laptop on the patio while the children splashed in the water. She says she feels more comfortable sending her children back to camp this summer but is still nervous about the risk of transmitting infections. She would like to see a higher vaccination rate in the St. Louis area to help tamp down the spread.

But after a year marked with social distance, months of distance learning and missed milestone events, the return to camp feels like a long-anticipated return to normalcy.

Children who were cheated out of a year of their childhoods can ease back into carefree summer days.

“It’s a camp, but it feels like so much more than that,” Biermann said.

Don’t say Gov. Mike Parson never gave Missouri cities anything.

He’s given hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest metro areas their own version of the Hunger Games -- a chance to hunt for the COVID vaccine in the reddest parts of the state.

More than 30,000 vaccine seekers in a private Facebook group are sharing stories like this recent post: “Drove with family members to Poplar Bluff for the Butler County mass vaccination event today, hoping for leftovers. Arrived at 3 p.m. (event ended at 4), told them we were Phase 3 and not yet eligible for appointments and just hoping for extras and were vaccinated within five minutes.”

Even when a vaccine hunter’s quest ends in success, these stories highlight the abject failure of state leadership.

Every day, there’s another example. The town of Monett, Missouri, with a population of less than 9,000, recently received another 1,000 Pfizer vaccines. Initially, only 100 people signed up to receive them. If St. Louis-area residents want to get those potentially lifesaving shots, they are invited to make the eight-hour round-trip drive to Monett. Twice.

More than 7,700 doses of vaccine were left over after mass vaccination events across the state in a single week, my colleagues reported. At an event at a high school in Unionville in late February, they had to throw out 143 unused vaccines.

Imagine that: wasting vaccines in rural Missouri, while more than 200,000 eligible people in St. Louis County are still waiting for theirs.

Parson has repeatedly defended the state’s vaccine distribution, which just so happens to heavily favor the areas that voted for him, as fair and equitable.

After seeing Parson’s comments, one reader wrote to me: “Don’t piss on us and tell us it’s raining, Governor.”

Meanwhile, The Missouri Independent reported that a consulting firm (paid for by the taxpayers) has repeatedly found Missouri’s urban centers have the largest “vaccination gap” -- the estimated number of eligible residents who still haven’t received their first dose of the vaccine.

The governor needed Deloitte Consulting to tell him this?

Beginning next week, an additional 550,000 Missourians will be eligible to get the vaccine -- including teachers. Perhaps the most ethical way for educators in big cities to spend their upcoming spring breaks would be to join in these Vaccine Hunger Games: Those who have the time and skills to hunt down a rural vaccine, and the means to drive hundreds of miles to get it, ought to do so. Hopefully, this will free up more doses in urban areas -- making it easier for the disabled, the elderly and the poorest residents, who can’t make an hours-long journey, to get the vaccine closer to home.

In fact, this is the advice that the St. Louis County Department of Public Health is giving residents who call them asking where they can get a shot.

For those who qualify and are able, “drive out and get the vaccine wherever they think they can get it,” said Dr. Faisal Khan, director of St. Louis County Department of Public Health. “The distribution of the vaccine is the major concern. The supply is the root cause, but the allocation piece has been a chronic issue,” he said.

Even as Missouri’s governor slowly realizes there is more “vaccine interest” in the most densely populated areas of the state, the supply is still a trickle.

“On March 15, we will have 130,000 more people eligible in St. Louis County, while the supply is still between 3,000 to 4,000 for our public health department,” Khan said. Hospital systems and pharmacies have their own allotments, but the health department often serves the most vulnerable populations.

Since he isn’t running for reelection, perhaps Parson feels protected from consequences of his pettiness, regardless of how deadly it could be.

But there are Republican legislators in these parts, too.

City-dwellers who have been left in a vaccine desert ought to ask their local GOP representatives to have a word with their guy.

He’s made it clear who he’s willing to hear.