Calvin White: Mental health in schools, what it really means
OPINION: It's time for a new vision of how our schools deal with the mental health of students
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Mental health and our kids, who hasn’t noticed that topic making the headlines? In school districts across the country it has risen to prominence as an issue schools need to tackle, and wellness centres have begun popping up within school buildings. Workshops on anxiety are featured in pro-d offerings. All of it sounds so good and gives the impression of action being taken to help our kids.
As well-intended as it may be, it is unfortunately rife with denial and it substitutes genuine attention and response with superficiality, and, as such, misdirects our youth. This is not to say that wellness centres in schools are a bad idea nor that mental health modules should not be in school curricula. Both can be quite useful and, for some kids, needed.
However, when we treat anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, substance abuse, risk behaviours, peer conflict, aggressive or bullying behaviour, and virtually every other manifestation of internal distress as some kind of abnormality that our kids’ can randomly fall victim to, we are either wilfully or ignorantly in denial. Kids are like thermometers: there behaviour and moods register the reality they live with.
And what is that reality? What do we absolutely know for a fact about our families? Well, we know that virtually half of kids live or will live in homes that don’t include both biological parents. Often this means a new “parent” of some sort entering the scene. In 2017, single parent families made up 19 per cent of all families. We know that kids live in families in which one or both parents are alcoholic or substance abusing, in which parents argue and fight regularly, where a parent has a serious mental illness ranging from depression to schizophrenia, or where poverty is debilitating. We know that some kids live in families where the parents’ jobs mean more than the kids do. We know that kids are victims of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse from someone inside the home, a relative, or family friend. We know that some parents are simply not emotionally available for their kids. We know there are parents who over-protect or micromanage their kids. And we know there are perfectionist or driven parents who demand discipline, achievement, or behaviour that is excessively disconnected from the nature of their kids who they may not even deeply know.
The list goes on. In fact, one can deduce that only a small percentage of kids are not living with one or more of these situations. This is not about blaming parents, after all the parents were once the same kids. It is about telling it the way it is. And there are obviously peer or community conditions that add to or even play a dominant role in the stress or trauma of the child.
In each scenario, the kids are helpless to change their situations. They are in towns of their parents’ choosing or own helplessness. Parents split up because they want to. They yell, criticize, go out for recreation, set rules, ignore, change jobs, engage in unhealthy habits, permit or expose their kids whenever they choose. Adults have power and kids receive the results. They are on their own in the emotional impact.
What does all this mean for the kids? Well, it means their lives on a 24/7 basis year after year may be so stress or sadness or loneliness inducing that of course they start to display attitudes, moods, or behaviour that cause themselves or others problems. Kids can’t fight or run from trauma in their homes — instead they absorb it and dissociate, compartmentalize, or act it out.
Thus, when our well-meaning school systems view mental health and wellness the way they do, we send the message that none of the above exists or matters. The message instead distils to the kid themselves have developed a mental health issue.
What we could choose to do is to normalize within our regular school days the practice of having rooms and personnel where kids can go and openly discuss their lived reality with a developed climate of confidentiality. School counsellors serve this role, but that tends to be an interjection in the curriculum-driven school day. The notion of a social well-being or truth room is a more advanced paradigm in which kids can associate with each other consciously choosing to let out their truth as an accepted part of the school day that is not viewed as conflicting with regular classes. This is a re-visioning of what schools are for.
How about yoga, meditation, nature walks, forest bathing, dance, music therapy, trampoline, climbing walls, sleep rooms and lots of other creative options that could be a regular part of a school day for just 40 minutes — but 40 minutes that touches the inner part of the child. And in touching that inner part, begins a deliberate process of building the child’s relationship with his/her individual and independent self rather than leaving the child dictated to by the vagaries of his/her relationship with stress or dysfunction in the home, the peer group, or the community. And I am including Grade 12 teenagers in my definition of “child.”
And then we can infuse our social studies and language arts classes with opportunities through units or singular lessons in which kids can learn about separated families and strategies to cope with that reality, about domestic discord and strategies to cope with that, about substance abusing parents and how to cope with that — in short classes delivered seriously throughout their school lives in which they learn ways to respond to the painful or confusing homes they face every day.
This, of course, opens up a can of worms. But it’s a hell of a lot more honest than implying that mental health issues are simply the kids’ problem that they happened to catch.
Calvin White was a high school counsellor for 30 years. He has a masters of education degree in counselling psychology and is the author of The Secret Life of Teenagers
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