Mental health in the news.
This morning in the New York Times was a remarkable article about school-based mental health care. The central question posed in the title was a bit off-putting at first, and it took me a bit to reread the work to clarify what I thought and felt about it. I want to extend thanks to Ellen Barry for their coverage of this work. Anytime we see mental health in the news, we should appreciate our colleagues in Journalism for keeping the discussion alive. I encourage you all to take a quick read.
When reflecting on this work, the first thing that jumps out is that this work is discussing the scholarship that is emerging questioning whole school, or whole class instructional practices on mental health. This is important to clarify because nothing in this work (or the subsequent articles' references) discusses ACTUAL mental health care in schools. That is the practice of embedding mental health staff in schools to provide direct, medically appropriate, high-quality care to young people in their school settings. This is a vital distinction because the literature in behavioral healthcare still states that increased access to care is needed across nearly every setting. Rapid access to mental health care improves outcomes for youth across multiple research studies.
The article does outline emerging literature that calls into question whole school mental health education practice. These practices include lessons provided to students on mental health education, mindfulness training, and awareness-raising exercises. These activities share more in common with public health practices than direct clinical work. The researchers offering these questioning critiques are brave in their work, as it is hard to go against the grain of common wisdom. What is complicated about this work is the difficulty in measuring and evaluating public health interventions on a small scale as they affect individual students. Certainly helping to make people aware of issues can help them to understand their world. It can also create situations where misunderstanding can make people’s lives harder.
We are engaged in a great “re-storying” of our culture. The impacts of digital communication (only a few decades old) are still playing out around us. The echoes of a global pandemic that killed over 7 million people are still loud in our consciousness. As participants in the great shift in communication and interaction, we need ongoing conversations about what is the best way to act. When we encounter work that asks questions about what we think is best, we need to engage curiously and openly. As educators, we need to become more open to looking at our work and trying to gather data to find the impact of our work. This article has given me the motivation to think about how can we begin to measure the positive and negative outcomes of mental health systems in schools. While offering services is beneficial, this article does point out that we also need to think about what kind of interventions we are offering and be open to both positive and negative aspects of the work overall.
Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/health/mental-health-schools.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
