Schools and Mental Health

When my school suffered the loss of one of its students due to suicide I was SURE the school was going to address it, so when I opened my Schoology page a few days later to find nothing but the number to a crisis hotline and a small reminder that “The staff are always here for you” I was slightly confused. I learned that the family had asked for their privacy so I could understand not mentioning the student by name but to do nothing but provide a number and an empty promise felt more like they were attempting to brush it under the rug, and now I was mad. This was a genuine chance for the school to reach out to it’s students and SHOW that they were there for them through support and giving them a place to mourn together and yet they did almost nothing, how could I not be livid? I also thought this would be a genuinely good time to address student mental health, and even believed that this could have been a good time for the school to look into possibly even implementing mental health segments into health classes so that we could help avoid situations like these in the future.

As I was going over all of this I noticed that the school counselor had recently sent me an email checking on me since my grades were abysmal, and I decided that I would bring up all of these thoughts with him since we had been told that he was there to talk if we needed anything. When the first meeting started I expressed how upsetting it was that a situation that was THIS heartbreaking seemed to be almost completely ignored by the school, and added my idea about implementing mental health segments into health classes as a way to help students who could be going through similar things. The counselor's response was to tell me that “We don’t know if the students could handle talking about something like this” and that “We already do have a mental health segment you just probably don’t remember” and as much as that response was probably genuinely meant to help all it did was make me even more upset.

After the meeting I took a day or two to calm down, and I thought for a moment that maybe he was right and I had just forgotten this as my high school career has been different from most other students. As such I decided to ask my peers if they had any recollection of any of it and the results were baffling. I decided to take notes of some of the responses I got, and by the end of the day I had 3 pages of quotes from students saying that they either didn’t receive any education on mental health or if they did they had said that it was so terrible they may as well have not taught it at all, some even saying that it was more harmful and triggering than anything. Now I was livid. I decided at that moment that I wanted to have another meeting with the counselor as he claimed he gives his own lecture on the subject.

Over the next week I prepared an argument as to why we needed a change in how mental health was handled in health classes, and I’ll give a summary of what I had thrown together. The first issue that I ran into was that I was told that if students were struggling with mental health they could just speak to the counselor, so that was the first issue I decided to address. First of all our counselor is an educational psychologist meaning that his main focus is going to be getting us to work better and more efficiently, he isn’t exactly trained to deal with suicidal and depressed teenagers. The next major issue was that no one trusts the faculty at this school, for a large variety of reasons. To simplify things I’ll just say that students have been let down for years, and there was no way that they would simply stop distrusting a system that had let them down so many times just because we were told that they were there for us. This meant that if a student was struggling with mental health then the likelihood of them reaching out for help from the school was extremely low, and I’ve met a very large number of students who can’t talk about these kinds of things with their parents either so now where do they go?

This brings me to my argument. If students can’t go to the school counselors or their parents to help with mental health, teaching coping skills and signs of different kinds of attacks (along with information on different mental disorders) in health classes could be a way to get them SOME help without forcing them into conversations and situations that could make things worse or just even make them uncomfortable. By teaching these kinds of things in classes then the very same students that have nowhere to go for help would start having a way to at least learn the basics of trying to take care of themselves mentally. It may take awhile but eventually that could even lead to a point where those students finally feel like they CAN reach out and try to ask for help, and this would be an ideal situation for everyone. My school is located in an area where most of the residents are in the upper-middle class and the school itself has a very large budget which made me think that hiring a trained psychologist to teach these kinds of subjects would not only be possible for the school but would also benefit the students much more than just having your average teacher talking about something that they themselves may not fully understand.

After about a week of putting this together I had another meeting with our counselor and by the end he ended up agreeing and suggesting that I go higher with a discussion like this, but for now I wanted to stick to the less stressful sounding meetings so my next goal was the Health and PE Department. For this meeting I wanted to go all out and have as much information available to me as possible, so I did around 6 hours of research on Florida and asked to see every member's class syllabus. I didn’t see mental health anywhere on the syllabi, HOWEVER I did find that Florida passed a law fairly recently that requires schools to teach students AT LEAST 5 hours worth of mental health related material yearly. Now we’re getting somewhere. With everything I had right now my argument had evolved to include the fact that there are even other states that are requiring the teaching of these kinds of things, so why aren’t we? After reading through around 26 Florida school district allocation plans (it was as boring as it sounds) I found everything I needed and was ready for the meeting.

So the Health and PE Department at my school consists of 5 or 6 staff members, all of whom are just gym teachers that also have to do some ACTUAL teaching now and then. I brought up my issues, explained my solutions and presented all my evidence, and they all agreed and we started discussing how we need to make changes! That was the Disney version of how the conversation ended. Instead of being taken seriously I was simply told “Well I already teach it so…” and the instructors that WEREN'T talking were busy looking like they would rather be anywhere else. The entire time I felt like I was just trying to be forced into going away and they invalidated the issue at every turn. The simple response of “I already teach that” made me angry simply because if that were the case then I wouldn’t be here. I didn’t JUST ask friends from my grade, I asked students that had already graduated and underclassmen if they knew anything about this school teaching things about mental health and all of them had the same response.

So to answer the question presented, I think that some faculty members do care. I had one teacher that was supporting me the whole way and told me that I was doing a good job and reassured me when I was starting to doubt myself, and I owe a lot to her because without her and the support of my friends I probably would have given up after that first meeting. I can’t say the same for other teachers and the school as a whole however. At the end of the day, the school just sees us as statistics. Walking numbers and percentages that make them look really good and if you don’t then you’re simply left behind because why spend resources on trying to help the ones that are failing when you could just put all your effort into the ones that are actually succeeding? I don’t think that the school system is completely failing it’s students, I really do think that some people have been helped. During the first meeting the counselor even told me that he helped around 95 students in a single semester so clearly there are genuinely people that end up being helped. The other side of that argument is that roughly 20% of high school students deal with mental health related issues and with 1300 students attending this school that still leaves around 170 students that AREN’T being helped.

The note that I want to end on is that I think that schools need to do a better job recognizing that students are more complicated than these systems they have set in place can handle. Not everyone is going to reach out to ask for help, and some people don’t even realize they have something going on BECAUSE they don’t learn about these kinds of things. Everything I know about mental health and mental disorders is from my friends and the internet. I know that there are some things that schools can’t be expected to do, they can’t provide therapy to everyone that needs it or suddenly erase the years of trauma that contribute to people's mental struggle the way that they do but they should strive more towards trying to at least help a LITTLE more instead of adding more stress. If you read all of this thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful day!

-Ian