Minnesota Now

By now, you’re probably well aware that teenagers in the U.S. are facing a full-fledged mental health crisis. The American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association have declared a “national state of emergency” for children’s mental health.

Two Minnesota teens had an idea to get ahead of mental health crises by helping other young people become more aware of their feelings.

Taara Verma and Siena Pradhan joined MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer to talk about Feel Now, the app they launched earlier this year.

Verma: This idea came to me after my own personal experiences in therapy and one technique that we would use in my sessions would be to start with identifying what emotions I was feeling right then. I felt this to be a pretty grounding experience, and just helped me become more in tune with my emotions and thus was able to help me figure out what to do with them.

I thought that if this was useful for me, I’m sure it would be useful to lots of other teens who unfortunately may not have had the privilege of receiving mental health care that I have.

Pradhan: I think that, especially when you’re targeting your audience towards teenagers, apps are an efficient way to get this out. So one of the main features of the app is that it sends a notification at any point in the day, and then you can check in at that exact moment.

We’re making sure that this app is really targeted towards teenagers and making sure that they are checking in with themselves, and kind of using those like social media aspects to do good.

Pradhan: What we did is we actually want to get a little bit more specific than just I’m feeling sad, but what type of sad exactly are you feeling? There are options like if you’re feeling grief, anger, not just anger, disgusted with yourself, isolated — things like that.

It’s a little bit more specific than just you’re feeling bad, you’re feeling good. So really honing in on what specifically are you feeling and maybe thinking about what that’s stemming from.

Verma: That was one feature that we were thinking about, you can have friends on the app. However, the distinction here compared to other apps is that you don’t share your specific emotions with your friends.

Oftentimes, what we’ve seen, is that there can be an unhealthy dependence between friends on their mental health and we didn’t want teenagers to potentially feel the burden of other people's emotions, especially every day for potentially multiple friends.

We actually don’t have a sharing emotions feature. We were hoping that when someone’s more in tune with their own emotions they can take some steps for themselves and share with friends but not with the app directly.

Pradhan: The friends on the app also just shows that you do have a support system. So you can always reach out to the friends you have on the app, reach out to your parents, reach out to a school counselor if you are feeling these sad or angry or anxious emotions are persisting over a long amount of time. We strongly recommend that you do.

But for the purposes of the app, it’s really just to get in tune with yourself and hold yourself accountable. So making sure that your friends are checking in with themselves, but not necessarily knowing what their feeling was how we wanted to go about that, especially since sometimes I don't exactly want to share everything I’m feeling with my friends but I just want to make sure that they’re there for me, and they know that I am taking care of myself.

Verma: Oftentimes I feel like people only get help once it’s — not too late — but once their mental health has gotten bad enough where it would have been beneficial for them to get help earlier.

And so what we’re hoping is if you find persistent sadness, persistent and if you notice that pattern, that that’s maybe something that can lead to more preventive intervention, rather than like almost waiting until it’s too late. So we hope that that will allow individuals to seek that help, you know, sooner rather than later.

Pradhan: I think that the best way to ease that stigma is to really bring it up in everyday life and not have it be some sort of taboo topic and not speak to have to be some sort of like big deal.

This app just really aims for you to just check in with yourself every single day, and that repetitive nature and making sure that you’re really like sticking to that and doing it for yourself is the best way that I think that we can reduce the stigma.

If everyone is just checking in with themselves, that can greatly benefit like mental health in general and also just maybe reduce the stigma of being sad, because that happens sometimes to everyone. But as long as it’s not a persistent sadness, then that’s alright to feel those feelings.

Verma: Both of us are from South Asian families and I feel like there is a lot of stigma around, you know, negative emotions and that stigma tends to manifest itself in terms of just denial. But we were kind of hoping is that it starts with yourself and then each person is able to kind of check in with their emotions.

My parents often will ask me, how was your day, how are you feeling and I think those conversations can always can often be awkward or uncomfortable. But hopefully, if this becomes a more routine practice, then we can kind of avoid some of that awkwardness and we can have more productive family discussion about emotions.

Pradhan: It’s going great. We have over almost 7000 downloads, I think on the app store right now. And that’s spanning over six continents.

Verma: We have several users in Burkina Faso. We have users obviously in Australia, India, Nepal, some countries in East Asia, Mexico — we have countries all over the world. I think it’s nearly 6900 across Google Play Store and app store.

I think the majority of those are coming from App Store downloads, but it's been really cool to see the app kind of progress and spread.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

For more mental health resources visit Call to Mind’s website, APM’s initiative to foster new conversations about mental health.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Remember our summer of smoke? The murky skies? The smell? There were days where you could almost taste the smoke. A special report from Axios finds this year, Minnesotans inhaled more Canadian wildfire smoke than much of the United States. In fact, the amount of smoke you took in was as if you smoked nearly four packs of cigarettes.

Thousands of wildfires across Canada this year incinerated an area larger than Florida and those fires are still burning today in Alberta and British Columbia. Thankfully, that smoke has not traveled to Minnesota the way it did this summer.

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  You’re not just seeing things Minnesota air quality this year is off to its worst start on record
  
  


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  Here's how breathing bad air affects you and how to protect your health
  
  


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  5 things to know about Minnesota's air quality alert
  
  


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  Wildfire smoke in Minnesota: How to best protect your health and your home
  
  


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  Minnesota sets record for most air quality alerts in a season
  
  

MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer looks back at the impacts of poor air quality in 2023 with Axios Twin Cities reporter Torey Van Oot.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

The city of Minneapolis is postponing the closure of an encampment of unsheltered people in a south Minneapolis neighborhood, according to a city spokesperson. 

In a statement to MPR News, Media Relations Specialist Sarah McKenzie said the city is working toward deescalating tensions surrounding the closure of Camp Nenookaasi, an encampment of more than 180 unsheltered people located near the intersection of 23rd Street and 13th Avenue in the East Phillips neighborhood. 

The closure was planned for Dec. 19, but McKenzie says the city needs more time to work out a plan with county, state and local social service providers before it can safely close the camp.  

“Once we have a plan in place with those partners, the closure will happen because we need to address the ongoing public health and safety issues at the encampment.” stated McKenzie.  

Tensions around the closure of the camp have risen over this past week as issues around public safety have grown. This past Tuesday evening, a man was fatally shot inside the encampment. 

The city said Helix Health and Housing, a social service agency operated by the Red Lake Nation, has helped to house 45 people from the camp. The city said Helix expects to house an additional 46 people in the coming days. 

In early December, the city posted a trespass sign at the camp notifying camp organizers and residents the encampment would be cleared on Dec. 14. Earlier this week, the date changed when the city told camp organizers it would wait an additional five days before closing the camp. 

The city did not provide a new date for the postponed closure.

St. Paul City Council has approved a budget for next year. It includes a tax hike of 3.7% and money for a host of programs and city services. The budget also funnels $1 million in leftover pandemic relief money from the federal government to a non-profit firm that will help residents who are saddled with medical debt.

When St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter announced this proposal back in August, he said about 43,000 people could benefit. So now that a plan to partner with non-profit RIP Medical Debt has been approved, how will it work? Mayor Carter joined Minnesota Now to talk about it.

Dayton, Minnesota-born Olympian Briana Scurry was recently honored by the Sports Museum, which awarded her its Soccer Legacy Award at a fundraising gala in Boston. Scurry played for the University of Massachusetts and became a starting goalie for the U.S. national team. She was one of the first players to compete in a women's paid professional league. She's made a big impact since being a star player at Anoka High School. But she has another legacy: as an advocate for treatment of traumatic brain injuries.

Minnesota Now is kicking off a new series called Connect the Dots. We’ll ask community elders in Minnesota to share their wisdom and lessons learned about what really matters in life. MPR’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell has been interviewing people 70 years and older for insights that might prove useful to younger generations.  

Chris’ inspiration for the title of the series comes from the commencement address at Stanford University by the late Steve Jobs. Jobs tells this story about how he formally dropped out of college, but informally still took courses that intrigued him, most notably a calligraphy class. Ten years later what he learned about calligraphy informed the wonderful typography designed into the first Mac computer. Jobs noted that you can only connect the dots looking backwards.  

The phrase “connect the dots” also suggests hard-earned wisdom. Chris asked people to look back on their experiences and to draw critical lessons about what they’ve learned about what truly matters.

Feven Gerezgiher, reporter and producer for MPR News, and Chris Farrell talked with William “Bill” English. He’s 89 years old. Bill was born and raised in Brooklyn, Illinois, which you might now know as Lovejoy. It’s one of the oldest Black towns in the U.S., founded by slaves who crossed the Mississippi River for freedom.  

 Bill moved to Minneapolis in the early 1960s with the idea of getting a graduate degree in sociology. However, he needed to support his growing family and instead got a job as the first Black salesman hired by 3M. Four years later he moved to the computer company Control Data, where he worked for 32 years in several positions, including vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer.   

Listen for Bill’s ‘connect the dots’ story.

You’ve likely seen holiday lights strung up on the houses in your neighborhood. And maybe you have a holiday tradition to pack into the car and see the best displays in the area. An annual guide can help you map out your road trip. Mike Marcotte is an Executive Producer at KSTP and runs the blog, Give Me The Mike. For the 7th year in a row, he is back with the Minnesota Holiday Lights Guide.

St. Paul City Council will erase $100 million in medical debt. Not every council member was in favor of that decision. The city’s mayor joined the show to chat about what it means for the city's new budget.

Minnesota elders have learned endless lessons through the years. Our new series asks them to "connect the dots."

The holiday season is inspiring some of us to look for the best light displays. The author of an annual holiday lights guide joined the show.

Minnesota-born Olympian Brianna Scurry has a fascinating story. We'll bring you it in today's "Minnesota Now and Then."

Watching the Twins and Timberwolves could get easier soon, as Axios Twin Cities reported earlier this week. Both teams are ending contracts with the parent company behind Bally Sports, which streaming services have dropped.

Of course, when you miss a game, Wally Langfellow and Eric Nelson can help you get caught up. Wally is the founder of Minnesota Score Sports Magazine and co-host of the sports talk show Ten Thousand Takes. Eric is the other host of that show and Vikings reporter for CBS Sports radio's Eye on the NFL.

The Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza strip has surfaced a wide spectrum of emotions for Jews. Some know where they stand, others are changing their perspectives, and some are unsure where to even begin. But people are guarded. Amid the tension, Jews are seeking opportunities to come together and they’re looking for guidance.