A recent mental health survey of children, conducted nationally in Australia revealed 14% of children/young adults suffer from mental health problems.
The World Health Organization report, Health for the World’s Adolescents (2014), found depression to be the main cause of illness and disability for adolescents aged 10 to 19, with suicide the chief cause of death after traffic injuries and HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, adolescents with mental health problems reported a much higher rate of drinking and drug use. So now that the erosion of our children’s mental health and indeed the future of our society is apparent and confirmed by statistics, the question becomes what are we doing about it?
With increasing rates of mental illness in children, it is peculiar that schools around the world, including Australian schools, continue to place an increasing emphasis on curriculum delivery, teacher quality and academic standards, and national literacy/numeracy comparisons through standardised testing, with many of these same schools reporting a declining trend in national literacy and numeracy.
Education departments around the world place much of the blame of falling literacy and numeracy standards on teacher quality, yet these same school systems do not even begin to address the fact of how teachers accomplish any sort of curriculum delivery when an ever-increasing proportion of our kids are mentally ill. Pushing an increasingly complex and competitive curriculum on students suffering mental illness is akin to training athletes using elaborate coaching methodologies, with the athletes suffering from malaria or something which actually prevents them from even participating in the sport, much less excelling at it. In other words, how can we expect to educate 14% of our children/young adults when their minds are not in a healthy and receptive state for learning in the first place?
In many areas of Australia and indeed the world, access to child and adolescent mental health services is either scarce or non-existent. Only one in four Australian children/young adults suffering from a mental illness reported receiving professional help. However, a majority of this reported professional help was serviced by health and education professionals with limited training in mental health intervention and, in most cases, was provided by school-based services.
Our children and young adults spend a large proportion of their day at school with teachers and their peers. Therefore, it makes sense that often detection and intervention of mental illness falls upon school staff. However, a recent survey of 600 Australian teachers and principals conducted by Beyondblue highlighted that half claimed they did not have time to focus on mental health issues and a fifth believed it was not their responsibility to do so.
It is apparent that schools and education professionals play a significant role in the intervention of child and adolescent mental illness, and whether schools take the initiative to intervene or not, the impacts of an increasingly large proportion of students suffering mental illness affects how schools function. Unfortunately, most school systems continue to drive their policy development with an increasingly narrow focus on student academic performance, whilst ignoring student welfare. However, at some point in the near future, school systems must realise what Aristotle said over 2000 years ago still applies today:
In many areas of Australia and indeed the world, access to child and adolescent mental health services is either scarce or non-existent. Only one in four Australian children/young adults suffering from a mental illness reported receiving professional help. However, a majority of this reported professional help was serviced by health and education professionals with limited training in mental health intervention and, in most cases, was provided by school-based services.
Our children and young adults spend a large proportion of their day at school with teachers and their peers. Therefore, it makes sense that often detection and intervention of mental illness falls upon school staff. However, a recent survey of 600 Australian teachers and principals conducted by Beyondblue highlighted that half claimed they did not have time to focus on mental health issues and a fifth believed it was not their responsibility to do so.
It is apparent that schools and education professionals play a significant role in the intervention of child and adolescent mental illness, and whether schools take the initiative to intervene or not, the impacts of an increasingly large proportion of students suffering mental illness affects how schools function. Unfortunately, most school systems continue to drive their policy development with an increasingly narrow focus on student academic performance, whilst ignoring student welfare. However, at some point in the near future, school systems must realise what Aristotle said over 2000 years ago still applies today:
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
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