We All Knew: Mental Health Lessons in Schools DO NOT Help

[SweetSue92]

Nursing is full of similar claptrap, thought up by people who haven’t worked bedside in decades and waste hospital money with their pointless and unnecessary office jobs

I’m guessing schools employ similarly pointless people who wouldn’t know how to run an actual classroom if their lives depended on it

This 1000 times over. Spent two years teaching, "moved up", now tells 30 year teachers how to do it.

Shut up, Ashley, I've got this lol

 

[Woodznutz]

We are not and have been drafted into this. Most of us do not like it, to say the least. While we are babysitting the mental health of a few kids, the rest of the kids' education suffers.

That's what "special ed" is for. Keep the rotten apples out of the barrel of good ones (not that those kids are rotten but it's a good example).

 

[Woodznutz]

Because it's what you overcome in life that gives "emotional satisfaction".

In other words, every generation has to reinvent the wheel. Sigh.

 

[Unkotare]

I saw this on a podcast and it's so good: helping your children with everything, never letting them struggle, feeds YOUR self-esteem and destroys THEIRS.

Yes.

Because it's what you overcome in life that gives "emotional satisfaction".

No profession is as stupid as mine, I'm convinced.

You bitch and moan every day, but you never do anything about it. Quit or STFU!

 

[Woodznutz]

We sometimes had 'special needs' kids transplanted into our classes. They either soon acted out or just failed, either way they were soon gone, much to our relief, and likely their as well.

 

[toobfreak]

helping your children with everything, never letting them struggle, feeds YOUR self-esteem and destroys THEIRS.

That's a good way to put it. It helps assuage a parent's insecurities by eliminating undue fears and worry. If the kids never struggle, you don't have to worry about them failing, unfortunately, it is the struggle that kids learn from, and they develop self-confidence in overcoming obstacles. But like you say, protecting them destroys their self-esteem because it sends a subliminal message to children that you either don't have confidence in their ability to succeed, or that they /need/ protected because there is something wrong with them.

Because it's what you overcome in life that gives "emotional satisfaction".

Yep. One of the greatest sources of emotional satisfaction comes from setting goals, plans for life, and then succeeding at maneuvering through the field of life's obstacles to achieve one's ends.

 

[Unkotare]

You don't need to have a Sigmund Freud couch in your classroom to take some extra time to listen to a student or just be there for a while. Sometimes a kid just needs an ear or a presence, not a psych degree.

 

[Meathead]

And they might even make children's mental health worse!

Anyone with common sense can understand this. If you are already mentally healthy--and most children are--cogitating on what is wrong just makes you feel worse. What helps? Learning things. Engaging. Facing challenges and overcoming them.

Lucy Foulkes is a UK psychologist who has studied this. Her article is enlightening. Except and link here:

Researchers have now run many studies testing the impact of universal school mental-health interventions and have found that they don’t really improve mental health. When improvements are found, they’re small – a tiny average shift on a symptom questionnaire – and the quality of the research is often poor, meaning it’s hard to trust the findings. The best-designed studies show that interventions don’t work at all: no improvement in mental health symptoms, either immediately after the course of lessons or later down the line.

In fact, some studies have found that universal mental-health lessons actually make things worse. There are now high-quality studies showing that school lessons based on CBT, mindfulness, dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) and general mental-health awareness lead to a small increase in symptoms of mental-health difficulties. There is evidence of other bad outcomes too, such as decreased prosocial behaviour or decreased relationship quality with parents.

Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work | Lucy Foulkes. First seen in Education | The Guardian. By Lucy Foulkes. – From the School Gates

It’s Saturday afternoon and my friend’s five-year-old daughter is lying next to me on her living room floor. She explains to me that she does this at school. She lies on her back with the rest of the class and they do something called the body scanner, where they all pay attention to various body…

fromtheschoolgates.co.uk

Children? Hell, those going to universities are seriously afflicted today.

 

[Woodznutz]

You don't need to have a Sigmund Freud couch in your classroom to take some extra time to listen to a student or just be there for a while. Sometimes a kid just needs an ear or a presence, not a psych degree.

I don't think there are enough 'ears' to go around.

 

[Unkotare]

I don't think there are enough 'ears' to go around.

Most people have two.

 

[Woodznutz]

Most people have two.

I don't know how effective it would be to be listening to a disturbed student with each ear (it would look silly as well).