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[quote=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

[quote]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.
[/quote]

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.

[quote]
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[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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