O3288: The Big Buddies Program - Be a Buddy, Not a Bully

Background: Per CDC's 2023 statistics on children's mental health, 16% of the U.S. high school students reported making a suicide plan in the past year, and 9% reported an attempt. Bullying is a known contributing factor, accounting for approximately 16% of the depression, anxiety, and stress reported by youth, making it a serious concern. The Big Buddies Program is a resident-led educational initiative that aims to address bullying at the grassroots level. By raising awareness and equipping students with coping strategies, the program seeks to foster mental health resilience amongst the adolescent population.

Project Description: The Big Buddies Program is a pilot community advocacy project. The program is delivered over a series of five educational sessions, involving the following topics: different types of bullying, underlying psychology and physiology of stress/depression/anxiety/PTSD, and how to ‘Look, Listen, Think, Act & Reassess’ to cope effectively. We adopted multi-modal teaching style, which includes jeopardy, theatre-play, flipped classroom, interactive video lectures, and games like ‘Whisper Down The Lane’. Through a community partnership, our program is now incorporated into the Health Curriculum Track at a local high school. To date, we have brought this program to 300 high school students (14-16 years of age). Per feedback from the students and the teachers, our program has increased their awareness and comfort in discussing a sensitive topic like bullying.

Discussion: This program was designed carefully to ensure that it is effective and sustainable. Firstly, by providing formal education to high school students, we are meeting them where they are. With schools being the most common place for bullying, we are addressing this issue at the grassroots level. Secondly, as young pediatricians-in-training, we are capitalizing on our relatability factor. Given that we are not their teacher or school principal and we are also young learners ourselves, we found it easy to build a good rapport with them. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of knowledge acceptance and co-operation from their end. Thirdly, the multimodal format of these educational sessions makes learning more enjoyable, engaging, and thus, more effective. Finally, this program has been sustainable with new residents taking it forward each year, as part of the community advocacy curriculum. The easy transferability of this program is important, as we hope to grow from a local to state level, and eventually to a national level.

Conclusion: Our vision with the Big Buddies Program is to create a safe community for the mental nurturing of adolescents and a bridge to help them reach the support systems in times of mental stress. We recognize that we are up against a huge mountain given the complex nature of this issue. Nonetheless, through this program, we are hoping to move this mountain one rock at a time.