More than 80% of students suffer from stress and anxiety with one in reporting that they suffer from mental health problems.
The Department for Education seems to be taking this very seriously, as there are clear guidelines about mental health provision and support for mental health in schools and colleges is monitored by an annual survey
One of the solutions to the high numbers of students suffering mental health issues is to teach mindfulness in schools, and a classic case of an organisation promoting this is the mindfulness in schools project. NB - in reference to the title, this is what I call ‘bullshit positive psychology’.
For younger children mindfulness lessons involve using analogies to help them focus their minds better, for example using a ‘torch beam’ metaphor for concentration, or the analogy of a snow globe to illustrate an overactive mind.
In my own college, we’ve recently had a ‘student health and well-being page added to our Moodle site, and mental health and well being have steadily made their way up the agenda in recent years: there was a ‘fair’ only this week in which students could do yoga and colouring in; we’ve also got ‘pet the dog’ sessions (all of this is for 17 year olds).
Obviously, the pro-mindful brigade cite various papers which show the benefits of mindfulness, while the skeptics point to the fact that longer term trials are needed to measure this properly. However, I’m not so concerned with whether it works or not, but rather with the fact that it’s something of a ‘band aid solution’ to stress induced by a broken system, and if we stop at mindfulness as the only strategy to tackle our current youth mental health crisis, we might end up making things worse.
Why mindfulness lessons might actually perpetuate mental-health problems….
I’ll keep my argument here pretty brief…
As I see it, the reason so many students suffer mental health issues is primarily due to social issues - mainly a combination of the pressure put on students to achieve in formal education (in turn caused by a marketised system) AND for many of them, to market themselves to get into university, while at the same time, in their ‘real (unreal) lives they are under media and peer pressure to ‘be someone’ - it takes an enormous amount of effort to construct and maintain a social identity these days.
Add on to all this the specific pressures on girls to be thin and pretty and the fact that at least a third of kids simply won’t have any where near the amount of money necessary to lead their desired lifestyle, then I think it’s fair to say many of our mental health issues have external roots.
And yet mindfulness is typically taught as a purely individualised solution to stress and anxiety. I know from personal experience that it is impossible to manage the levels of stress induced by an unmanageable teacher workload, hence why I’m quitting - so simply by applying the same logic to students (who will for the most part have much less mental-control than I do), mindfulness will simply not work to tackle their ‘unmanageable workload either - that is the work associated with college and of ‘constructing an identity’.
In this context, mindfulness might (a) just be something else students feel they have to do and (b) if they’re still stressed after a month of pseudo meditation classes they might end up thinking there’s something really wrong with them rather than blaming the system.
IMHO what students really need to help them cope is for adults to be honest about what a shitty education system we’ve got, and in the longer term we need to look at de-marketising the education system, and maybe make it more about teaching and learning rather than results in order to take the stress out it.
As to other social causes of the mental health crisis, obviously schools (or unschools) are good place to educate students about these, but I think before we look at how to do this, we at least need to stop education itself being part of the problem!
PostScript
NB - I’ve nothing against mindfulness as taught as part of the Noble EightFold Path, but I’ve got a MASSIVE problem with it when it’s hijacked by the positive psychology movement and taken away from its roots.
If you like this sort of thing, when why not check out my other blog over at ReviseSociology.com - with >500K hits a month ATW I think it's fair to say it's one of the most visited sociology blogs UK, possibly the whole world.
For the previous 8 posts in this series please click here - Hub Post - 11 Reasons I’m Quitting teaching