The debut episode of SHINEcast — a new podcast produced by Napa Valley high school students — vibrates with anticipation. The opening minutes of the series are full of flushed cheeks, nervous giggles and eyes darting around the studio, looking for a place to focus. It’s an exercise in composure that instantly reminds adult viewers what it feels like to be a teenager.
“I was super nervous,” said Maia Medalle, a sophomore at American Canyon High School who recently appeared on the show, which is also broadcast on YouTube. “I remember my hands were shaking and I was super sweaty, but I felt really passionate about the topics that day and I knew that I had something to (contribute).”
The central topic of SHINEcast is teen mental health, and the goal is to break down the stigmas that prevent young people from getting the support they need.
Student producers meet regularly to plan episodes, research topics, and record and edit the show. But that’s the easy part. More challenging, they say, is mustering the courage to share their stories and make themselves vulnerable in a public way.
“That was definitely a process within itself,” Medalle said, adding that doing the podcast “gave me a lot of strength to be vulnerable because I knew that I wasn’t alone in my problems.”
Over the first three episodes of the show, the young hosts and their guests tackle issues around anxiety, body image and transitioning out of high school. And despite a few awkward introductory moments, once they get going, they really get going. A fourth episode, about academic pressure, is about to be released.
The group recorded its first episode in November, just a few days before the deadline to apply to California’s public universities, and spoke about their fears that even a slight mistake on their applications could have devastating impacts on their lives.
“I dedicated my entire junior year to preparing to be able to go to college,” Brianna Ramirez, now a senior at Napa High School, said during that show. “It was, like, hands down, probably the worst year of my life.”
With that, the four students start talking like experts on a panel show and launch into an impassioned critique of the academic and extracurricular expectations placed on young people trying to get into college.
“You need to be a better student, a better scholar, a better, more involved person within your community,” said another co-host, Demian Gonzalez, a senior at New Technology High School. “And, like, not everyone has the bandwidth for that. Not everyone has the time nor the family situation to be able to participate in all that. You know, what if you’re at home, you know, your parents work all day and as soon as you get home you have to take care of your younger siblings?”
Ava James, another co-host and a senior at American Canyon High, agreed.
“And we’re all still in high school,” she said. “You can’t be expected to, like, come up with the cure to cancer.”
The teens describe a mounting pressure to define their lives and choose a path that will require a massive investment of time and money, even before they’re old enough to vote.
“It’s scary because you don’t know what you’re doing now,” Ramirez said. “It’s like, how am I supposed to figure out what I’m going to do in the next four or five years? So it’s definitely terrifying.”
The series is full of those kinds of relatable concerns, and people are listening. The show appears on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and has been downloaded close to 1,000 times since launching in January.
The podcast is a project of SHINE Napa Valley, a collaborative of local youth-serving nonprofits, including Mentis Mental Health Services, Aldea Children & Family Services, the Napa Valley Education Foundation, On The Move and UpValley Family Centers. The partnership’s goal is to maximize the access young people have to mental health services.
Jennifer Stewart, executive director of the Napa Valley Education Foundation, said there are numerous barriers to mental health care that teens must navigate. Those include access to services (especially during school breaks or weekends), cost, perceived social stigmas about asking for help and a shortage of therapists, especially ones with bilingual skills or bicultural backgrounds.
“There are very few mental health therapists in Napa County,” particularly outside of the school system, said Stewart.
Despite the emergence of more intensive mental health support in Napa’s public schools in recent years, the students who make SHINEcast believe that effective support for teenagers requires a teenage perspective.
“I know that SHINEcast was something that I would have wanted when I was younger and I was struggling,” Ramirez said in an interview. “Mental health can get very ugly, and it can feel horrible. You can feel like you are very alone. But I don’t want anyone to feel like that.”
She said a recent SHINEcast episode that focused on healthy relationships was especially meaningful to her.
“That episode to me was really important because I struggled with a relationship,” she said. “It was nice to be able to talk about it because I know there’s plenty of people that I know that also struggle with relationships.”
Diego Sanchez, a 17-year-old senior at Vintage High School, said the podcast has not just been a way to reach his peers but also a growth opportunity for himself.
“One of the things that piqued my curiosity and my interest in participating in the podcast is because I’ve always wanted to take a risk and step outside of my comfort zone,” said Sanchez, who goes by Ten. “And it was, honestly, always a dream of mine to be part of a platform that talks about the sort of stigmatized issues that people don’t really talk about. And I always wanted to be that person, like a sort of role model to others.”
Sanchez said the show is a way to talk about things like social media and entertainment that offer young people comforting “dopamine hits” but that ultimately isolate them and, in turn, perpetuate silent suffering.
“We kind of have become paralyzed by a lot of the modern-day comforts in life,” he said, adding that teens have been inundated with technologies that allow them to hide from painful issues and injustices in the real world. “And instead of trying to address those issues, we kind of just try to forget about them,” he said. “We try to not think about them because obviously, it’s not going to make us feel good.”
SHINEcast, he said, aims to empower youth to participate in their own mental health, and to leverage that strength to focus on larger concerns.
“It’s kind of paving the way of what a new democracy could almost look like,” he said, “where those people who are being affected — like the teens — you actually give them a voice and you let them speak. And hopefully others will listen.”
Jennifer Huffman is the business editor at The Napa Valley Register. The Register is a partner of The Intersection and CVJC.
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