Schools are over doing it on the mental health awareness

[Anonymous]

Schools are overly focused on mental health issues, and this may lead to self diagnoses, a bit like a hypochondriac who watches too many health shows and thinks they have every disease that matches their symptoms. I confess, this happened to me when I was pregnant and was watching the "what could go wrong in your pregnancy" health tv shows. I'm a worry wort, and watching these shows made things worse for me.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/talking-too-much-mental-health-181055810.html

some researchers warn that we are in danger of overdoing it. Mental health awareness campaigns, they argue, help some young people identify disorders that badly need treatment — but they have a negative effect on others, leading them to over-interpret their symptoms and see themselves as more troubled than they are.

In a paper published last year, two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.

I think it's like some kids who are going through some rough times and think they are clinically depressed or have clinical anxiety, rather than just being stressed out due to circumstances. It seems too much of this kind of pushing labeling of disorders is not creating a resilient person.

That's not to say that there are not legitimate mental health issues.

DC has some anxiety that was exacerbated after a traumatic event. They are seeing a therapist. But, truth be told, I don't think the anxiety necessarily requires a therapist, just time and maturity. But, it makes DC feel better to be able to talk to someone who is not me.

A study found that a "mindfulness" exercise did not help, and in some cases, made things worse. The school district we are in uses these "wellness and mindfulness" programs, and DC tells me that none of the kids find it helpful.

The results were disappointing. The authors reported “no support for our hypothesis” that mindfulness training would improve students’ mental health. In fact, students at highest risk for mental health problems did somewhat worse after receiving the training, the authors concluded.

Researchers in the study speculated that the training programs “bring awareness to upsetting thoughts,” encouraging students to sit with darker feelings, but without providing solutions, especially for societal problems such as racism or poverty. They also found that the students didn’t enjoy the sessions and didn’t practice at home

I hope this is a fad that will die out, much like the fad of the new math and the new way of teaching reading rather than phonics. It's not that I don't believe in mental health; I absolutely do, but per the research, I also think schools are going overboard with it. It's like those other things: they find the newest fad and dive into the deep end without really analyzing the results. Not that dissimilar to how so many kids cannot perform at grade level after the new way of teaching math and reading was implemented, but school districts keep using that method regardless.

I think they need to provide a better way of addressing mental health issues at school.

[Anonymous]

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1203633.page

[Anonymous]

Democrats run our public schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Democrats run our public schools.

Yes, they generally do, even in red areas. Why? Because Republicans are uninterested in educating and raising the next generation.

Or maybe this isn't a D or R issue?

[Anonymous]

My kid said the only thing she learned in health class was how to do drugs. She wasn’t totally kidding.

[Anonymous]

In the case of schools approach to student mental health, the “cure” is causing the problem.

[Anonymous]

This is not the same in every state and in every school system. Each mental health awareness progam intervention should be tailored to the school, families and the communities. It is not a one size fit all. The awareness campaign or whatever the program/ intervention needs to reflect the current issues in the state or district. In some states, the suicide rates are climbing. In other states it is improving. For the study quoted above, how many schools were in the study? How many children attended the schools that participated in the awareness campaign? Can this study results be replicated across the country?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Democrats run our public schools.

Yes, they generally do, even in red areas. Why? Because Republicans are uninterested in educating and raising the next generation.

Or maybe this isn't a D or R issue?

Rs ran for school board positions in FFX and MoCo, but you only vote as you are told and never think for yourself.

Enjoy your crime without consequences and one-party rule.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Democrats run our public schools.

Thank fcking god

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Democrats run our public schools.

Do you think mental health awareness isn't a think in private schools?

[Anonymous]

I think we've become too sensitized on the topic.

People throw mental health related terms around so much in relation to normal emotional responses that they've lost some of their importance.

I'm a MH professional. I hear so many people say "I'm really OCD about..." or "I'm so OCD I must..." and then they describe situations that are not related to OCD.

Ex:
Friend: I'm so OCD. I have to fix my coffee in a certain order each morning. Sugar, coffee, then creamer.
Me: What happens if you do it out of order?
Friend: nothing
Me: So if I forced you to do it out of order, you could and you could still drink the coffee?
Friend: yeah, I'm just really OCD about the order
Me (not verbally to them): that's not OCD. A person with OCD will dump the coffee upon realizing they did it out of order and start over. Or if provided a beverage that was prepared by someone else in the wrong order, they will pretend drink it but not actually drink it.

Or people say "I'm so OCD about my books! They have to be in color order!" No, that's a preference. You have a strong preference on how you like your books organized. If someone messed with them as a joke, you'd be annoyed and work on fixing them, but maybe not right at that moment. A person with OCD might have a meltdown and would not be able to focus on anything else until all books were corrected.

Even my own kid came to me and said "I'm so depressed..." ok, that's alarming. We talked it out. They were not depressed. They were simply sad. They were sad that a show they enjoyed was canceled. Depression is not simple sadness.

We need to get kids comfortable with feeling emotions again and have them understand that feeling sad doesn't make you depressed. Feeling anxious before a test or presentation doesn't mean you have anxiety. Liking things organized doesn't mean you have OCD or autism.

[Anonymous]

1. This isn't new. I ran with the weirdo crowd in high school (2000-2004) and it was a badge of honor if your parents sent you to the local psych hospital. Basically if you weren't a popular athletic type, the alternative was to take pride in being a neurotic mess.
2. Yes, it seems to be getting worse, especially because these kids are carrying this into adulthood. I work with 3 people under 25 and all three of them have told me about their psychiatric diagnoses. I am a coworker in my late 30s who barely knows them!

[Anonymous]

As a nurse I can relate to the poster about missing mental health terms, but in my case it's general medical knowledge. Maybe the overall issue is we have so much information available to us now, that we think we know stuff, but we are actually just idiots. Since the Internet does exist, perhaps the point of mental health awareness is to try and educate everyone at least a little.

[Anonymous]

I'm going to go out on a limb and throw the "active shooter" drills into the same category as mental health. There are over 130,000 K-12 schools in the U.S. and excluding individual incidents, the chance of having to hide from another Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Uvalde type killer is too miniscule to warrant this level of attention. It broadly reflects the freakonomics that Americans practice in the sense of spending the majority of their resources mitigating the most remote risks while overlooking the big ones.

[Anonymous]

OP here.. agree.. the MH diagnosis is overused such that it's become meaningless.

My DD actually has diagnosed anxiety with panic attacks (I've witnessed several of these attacks) and has been in therapy for a couple of years on and off. She was told by her friends who have ADHD that she must have ADHD. She doesn't, but now she's acting like she might. Oh, and she said I have OCD. I have a preference for how I want things (per the MH pp), that's all (and I am Type A and stubborn, so that doesn't help, either). I definitely don't have OCD.

I think the over use and prevalence of these mental health issues has made my DD hyper aware of it.