Mental health education needs a makeover

Today in America, about 17.7 percent of youth, approximately 10.8 million people, have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression or behavioral problems related to them.

With teen stress, anxiety and trauma at an all-time high, the topic of conversation is slowly shifting toward mental health education. Administrators are understandably worried as suicide is still the second leading cause of death for American youth.

People want to know how to make the situation better, leading administrators to ask students, “What can we do?”

For starters, schools have to change the way they address mental health.

Though steps have been taken in the right direction with more programs teaching students about mental health, physical fitness is still seen as a priority over mental health nationwide. What many fail to understand is that physical and mental health go hand in hand.

In his talk “Capitalism Makes us Crazy,” physician and internationally renowned trauma expert Gabor Mate notes that society only focuses on what physically makes people sick. Our current medical model “separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health.”

Being mentally ill can take as much of a toll on a person’s body as being physically sick, as mental health affects the way a person views themself, views others and manages emotions and situations.

Mental illnesses like depression can make it seemingly impossible for teens to get up in the morning and will themselves to do simple tasks. Every task feels like it requires more effort than one can exert. Whereas an adjusted diet or exercise regimen may fail to solve the problem, the proper mental help, support and perhaps medication will.

Society continues to perpetuate the myth that mental illness can be cured by “being happy” or “trying new things.” But people with serious mental illnesses need to be regarded with the same seriousness as people with physical disabilities, and the stigma surrounding them is insensitive and unnecessary.

Mental illnesses cannot be ignored, and they do not just “go away.”

Current mental health education teaches skills to identify mental illnesses and tell when something is out of the ordinary. We are then told to reduce the burden of stigmatism by understanding mental illness as a biological condition and not a psychosocial one, ignoring the societal cause of the issue and blaming it on genetics instead.

However, studies conducted in Germany, Australia, England and America have shown that thinking about mental illnesses in this way has just increased discrimination and stereotypes surrounding them, associating them with unpredictability, chaos and dangerousness.

The flaw of the current mental health education system is that it fails to take into account or even discuss the social conditions that cause young people to suffer from mental illnesses in the first place.

Schools should mimic the “restorative justice” system when addressing this issue. This system, first made for disciplinary action, forces administrators to understand the roots of a student’s actions instead of merely punishing them for their actions without regard for the whole person.

The same idea can be used to address mental health: paying attention to the root of the problem instead of acknowledging it.

If a doctor tells someone they have appendicitis, but does nothing to treat the appendix, you would think something is wrong with your doctor.

Being able to identify mental illness is a step in the right direction, but properly educating a school about treating mental health would help those affected and increase empathy among other students, improving the emotional health of a school as a whole. Targeting toxic factors of a school such as the deteriorating image of self-worth, parental and peer pressure or academic or extracurricular stress would benefit the community.

Programs like CASSY are a great step forward for this way of thinking and educating.

Mental health awareness is not the same thing as mental health education. Our society is a clear indication that people are aware that mental illnesses do exist, shown by the thousands of studies, surveys and calculations conducted. However, people need to stop being satisfied with “being aware” and need to be educated on how to actually lower these alarming statistics.