Mind Moves:At any time, one in five students in every Irish classroom will have a significant mental health difficulty and many others are coping with family and relationship conflicts that have a negative impact on their health and educational performance.
We tend to shy away from talking to young people about mental health issues for fear of "putting ideas in their heads" but when you ask young people what they need, they identify more information and support around mental health in schools as a priority.
However, for hard-pressed staff who have to cope with a packed curriculum, mental health promotion can seem like a bridge too far. Society may pay lip service to the notion of preparing our young people for life and not just the Leaving Cert, but in a climate where the point system rules, we prioritise academic achievement.
Ever greater attention is given to ensuring that young people leave school with the expectations, attitudes and values that will make them employable. As Sweeney and Dunne commented in their report, Youth in a Changing Ireland(2003), the focus of our education system has changed from serving the needs of the young person to serving the needs of our society and indeed our economy.
The advice we often give to a young person going through a tough time is to talk to a teacher they trust. We should also be thinking about how we can better support teachers to build their confidence and capacity to respond appropriately to students who make such an approach.
In so doing we can maximise the opportunity for identifying those one in five students experiencing significant distress and preventing an emotional crisis developing into a more severe, enduring and disabling problem.
The Gatehouse Project, run by the Centre for Adolescent Health in Melbourne, has developed a unique approach that may help us. This project is based on the premise that our mental health is profoundly influenced by the environment in which we live. Since schools are places where young people spend half their waking lives, it is logical to create an environment that impacts positively on their wellbeing and engagement with learning.
Research has shown that when students feel a sense of connection to their school, their health and educational outcomes improve. The Gatehouse Project has identified three priority areas for action to build a sense of connectedness in schools: building a sense of security and trust; enhancing opportunities for communication and belonging; and building a sense of positive regard through valued participation in school life.
Students need to feel secure and safe, not just from physical harm, but safe to be themselves, whatever their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, family background or interests. Communication is important for building social connectedness and includes having the opportunity to talk to others - not only designated professional counsellors - who are supportive and trustworthy.
Positive regard has to do with feeling you have something to give and that whatever you may risk contributing is valued and acknowledged.
Gatehouse sees every classroom moment as an opportunity to promote these basic factors, its curriculum permeates every subject and empowers every teacher to make a real impact on their students' wellbeing. Through the medium of classroom teaching - whether it's maths or English literature - students are encouraged to enhance awareness of their own decision-making and problem-solving skills and experiment with more effective learning and coping behaviours.
Students presenting with emotional or mental health difficulties are often sent to the counsellor to be "fixed" and sent back to class when they are ready. Gatehouse appreciates that every young person needs to find their own path and that this can take time. Its focus is on developing a school environment which can accommodate and nurture every student in finding a way forward.
The project has been received very positively by both staff and students in schools around Australia and evaluations have demonstrated its positive impact on reducing a wide range of health risk factors, including alcohol and drug use.
Mental health promotion is a game worth playing. The attractions of the Gatehouse approach include not asking schools to introduce a lot of new material and additional classes, but to look at what's already happening and promote mental health through the core business of teaching and classroom interactions.
It provides schools with resource materials for guiding them in their efforts to reduce risk factors for students and enhance protective factors that affect health and educational outcomes (available through its website gatehouseproject.com).
This approach in no way diminishes the value of one-to-one counselling and support for students, but it broadens the whole issue of mental health promotion and creates an ethos within schools where everyone's mental health can thrive.
Tony Bates is chief executive of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health.
