‘The Crisis Isn’t Over’: Maui Kids’ Mental Health Needs Are Mounting

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Mia Palacio felt like she lost a piece of herself after wildfires destroyed much of her hometown of Lahaina in 2023. 

Palacio struggled to deal with the grief of losing her town and home. She isolated herself from her loved ones and often felt angry — that her family didn’t have a permanent place to stay, that more people weren’t able to evacuate the night of Aug. 8, that she was moving between high schools where she didn’t feel welcomed. 

The pain only intensified as the months wore on and, finally, nearing the first anniversary of the fires, Palacio reached out for help.

Hundreds of students like Palacio have struggled mentally since the fires and not all have received the help they need. The Hawaiʻi Department of Education estimates more than a third of Maui students lost a family member, sustained a serious injury or had a parent lose a job after the fires, which killed 102 people and damaged more than 3,300 properties in Lahaina. 

Two years later, many in Lahaina are ready to return to normal. But therapists say students’ mental health challenges continue to mount. 

That’s common after a disaster, especially at the two-year mark, when adrenaline wears off and stress remains high, said Christopher Knightsbridge, one of several researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi who has studied the well-being of Lahaina fire survivors. While kids may feel numb immediately following a disaster, after two years, they’re facing the toll of constant uncertainty and change, he said.  

It’s a phenomenon seen wherever schooling has been disrupted by natural disasters, reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat, The Associated Press and several other news outlets shows. But a couple years after the disaster, schools are not always prepared with extra mental health supports. On Maui, for instance, the island is dealing with an ongoing shortage of specialists. In the past few years, the number of psychiatrists serving youth has dropped from four to two, even as demand has grown.

“The crisis isn’t over,” Knightsbridge said. 

Two Years In 

Palacio made progress with the help of a school counselor and then a local organization that supports teens’ mental health through outdoor activities and adventures. Now, the senior at Lahainaluna High School said she’s more comfortable confiding in others and controlling her emotions, and she takes pride in mentoring younger students who have also struggled since the fires. 

But two years in, many kids still wrestle with depression and anxiety.

DayJahiah Valdivia, a senior at Kīhei Charter School, said her stress levels still spike when there’s strong winds or small brush fires on Maui. Valdivia lives in Upcountry Maui, which also faced wildfires that burned over a thousand acres of land on the same day as the 2023 Lahaina fires. Her home was spared, but it took months for her family to return because their property was covered in soot and needed professional cleaning. 

She feels less anxious now that her family has discussed their escape plan for future disasters. But a summer fire near a friend’s home in Central Maui renewed her fears about her loved ones’ safety. 

“The anxiety never really wore off,” she said, adding it was especially difficult to concentrate in class or feel safe on windy days during the first year after the fires. 

In a UH study of Maui fire survivors conducted in 2024, just over half of children reported symptoms of depression, and 30% were likely facing an anxiety disorder. Nearly half of kids in the study, ages 10 to 17, were experiencing PTSD. 

Children in disaster-torn towns across the U.S. can relate. 

In Paradise, California, where the 2018 Camp Fire took 85 lives, a protracted period of disillusionment followed what some called the “hero phase,” where the community pulled together and vowed to resurrect their town. Both Lahaina and Paradise had housing shortages after their fires, so families had to move away or live with friends to go to school or work in the area. In general, students who don’t have a permanent living arrangement tend to struggle more academically and have more behavioral challenges, research shows. 

Many Paradise students still cope with anxiety and grief, seven years later, making it difficult to fully engage in school. A year after the Camp Fire, 17% of students were homeless, and the suspension rate was 7.4%, compared to 2.5% statewide. The suspension rate remained nearly triple the state average last year, and more than 26% were chronically absent. 

Aryah Berkowitz, who lost her home, two dogs and her family’s business in the Paradise blaze, dealt with lingering behavioral challenges following the disaster. For nearly a year afterward, her family of seven, plus a pair of surviving pitbull-labrador mixes, lived with a friend in nearby Chico, sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom. Berkowitz, then in sixth grade, slept on the couch.

“I was having to help my family a lot and wasn’t able to handle it,” said Berkowitz, a once-high-achieving student who was suspended twice after the fire. “I was holding it inside and took it out on other people. Some days I’d just walk out of class.”

Back on Maui, many students similarly disengaged from school.  In a DOE survey of Maui students in the first year after the fires, roughly half of kids said they were having trouble focusing in class or felt upset when they were reminded of the wildfires.   

Some have found it difficult to retain class material or simply stopped attending in-person classes as they moved between hotel rooms and temporary housing, according to Lahainaluna High teacher Jarrett Chapin. A few moved to online learning as their families faced continued instability. 

“They just sort of vanished,” Chapin said. 

A Shortage Of Specialists

Maui has long dealt with medical workforce challenges. Even before the fires, Maui faced a shortage of mental health professionals because of the state’s high cost of living and housing shortage.

The fires brought burnout and greater economic obstacles, only exacerbating the issue. Since then, Hawaii’s education department has tried to bulk up Maui’s mental health staff, first by bringing in providers from neighbor islands and the mainland and then by using a $2 million federal grant to support students’ well-being and academics. 

But hiring mental health staff has been so difficult that even the federal money hasn’t made much of a dent: In the first nine months of the grant, the state education department primarily used the money to bus displaced students nearly an hour to Lahaina schools from other parts of the island.

The state has now used the money to hire five part-time mental health providers working with students and staff, including one specialist who works in the evenings with students who live on Lahainaluna’s campus as boarders, said Kimberly Lessard, a Department of Education district specialist.

Still, two of the six behavioral health specialist positions in Lahaina schools remained unfilled as of this summer and have been for years, Lessard said. 

Valdivia, who still deals with anxiety from the Upcountry Maui fires, has seen the impacts of the provider shortage firsthand. She’s on a two- to three-month waiting list to see a psychiatrist on Maui, and she’s seeing an Oʻahu-based therapist via telehealth because there aren’t enough providers who can meet with her in person. 

While she’s grateful to have connected with a therapist who can make their virtual meetings work, it’s frustrating to go through such a lengthy process to get help, Valdivia said. 

“Even just to get evaluated (by a psychiatrist), it’s literally months,” she said. “I just think that’s crazy.”

It’s common for disaster-torn communities to struggle with shortages of psychological staff, often because of burnout and a lack of resources. 

In Puerto Rico, which has suffered from a series of disasters since Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, students have experienced high rates of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Yet despite legislation in 2000 to create more school psychologist positions, it wasn’t until the pandemic that the commonwealth’s Education Department dedicated money to hire them. 

The school psychologists “can’t keep up,” said Nellie Zambrana, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. Those who are working are overstretched, according to a study by the university’s Psychological Research Institute. One psychologist, the study said, was assigned to more than 100 students at three schools. 

New Ways To Help

On a Tuesday afternoon in June, Loren Lapow wasn’t deterred by the storm clouds gathering over D.T. Fleming Beach on Maui. The social worker helped teens carry an inflatable paddleboard to the water’s edge, cheering them on as they swam. 

Amid the fun, Lapow directed the teens to reflect on their fears and losses, asking them how they feel when they smell smoke in the air or think about Lahaina’s Front Street, most of which was destroyed in the blaze. 

“Places are like a friend to us,” Lapow said. “When you lose places, it hurts.” 

Lapow founded the Maui Hero Project, which his website describes as “adventure-based counseling services.” The eight-week program Lapow started just over 25 years ago teaches kids basic disaster preparedness skills and immerses them in outdoor activities. It’s also a form of mental health support. Healing from trauma comes in many forms, Lapow said, whether it’s helping kids create new friendships or leading small group discussions about the mental toll of the fires.  

“We need to create a culture of healing and resiliency,” Lapow said.

Lapow’s approach has become a common strategy for nonprofits and therapists trying to reach kids who have balked at discussing their mental health since the fires. But those efforts aren’t always reaching kids who need the most help. 

There’s a strong stigma around seeking mental health services, particularly in Filipino and Latino communities that make up a large portion of Lahaina’s population, said Ruben Juarez, a professor at UH who led the research study on fire survivors. Families may see counseling as a sign of weakness, he said, and children may be reluctant to open up to therapists out of fear of being judged or scrutinized.

Yet in the study, Latino teens reported the highest rates of severe depressive and PTSD symptoms. Filipino teens reported some of the highest rates of anxiety. Similar cultural trends are seen in communities across the U.S.

Moving forward, Juarez said, kids’ mental health needs to be at the forefront of recovery plans. 

The state is hoping struggling students will open up to their peers.  A new Oregon-based program called YouthLine will train Hawaiʻi teens to respond to crisis calls, said Keli Acquaro, the administrator for the Department of Health’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division. In addition to providing kids with real-time support from people their own age, Acquaro said, it will hopefully strengthen the pipeline of local students considering careers in mental health. 

Keakealani Cashman, who graduated from Kamehameha Schools Maui in 2024, is hoping to be part of the state’s solution to provide more mental health support to the next generation of children. 

After losing her home to the fires, Cashman spent her senior year talking to Native Hawaiian practitioners and researching how cultural values, like connections to the land and her ancestors, could help her community heal from the trauma of the fires. The project improved her own mental health, said Cashman, who regularly met with her school’s behavioral health specialist. 

Now, Cashman is entering her second year at Brigham Young University Hawaii and hopes to work as a behavioral health specialist in Hawaiian immersion schools.  

“This horrible, horrible thing happened to me and my family, but I don’t have to let it kill the rest of my life,” Cashman said. “I can really help my family, my community in school, and just make an impact in what I know how to do.” 

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