Improving Mental Health Eco-systems in Schools

In the last week, there has been a lot of talk about mental health in schools since the recent incidents of students displaying acts of violence or harming themselves and others.

The Education Minister proposed several measures, including

1. Increasing the number of teacher-counsellors
2. Recruiting more school counsellors?
3. Having teachers check in on their students' well-being at the start of every school term?

These are on top of the current support system of having peer supporters, teacher-counsellors, counsellors, and referral to social service agencies.

I agree with the minister's quote:

Our approach should not only be to strengthen the overall system of support, but to engender a much more caring and nurturing environment in our society

However is the above system an adequate one? Especially in these times of COVID-19 pandemic, where many people are stressed, overworked, and tired, from the extended fear of COVID-19 lurking amongst us, daily hassles of prolonged WFH and HBL, and lack of social support.

The whole mental health support system may be stressed, as a matter of fact.

How can we improve the mental health support ecosystem, such that students will truly experience positive mental well-being, aka mental wellness?

a) Having peer supporters is a wonderful initiative in schools. We know that youths are more likely to seek their friends' help, as compared to parents and teachers. However due to COVID-19 and the restrictions of social distancing and interactions, there are reports of reduced opportunities for peer support. Hence even if you have peer supporters in schools and a system of helping, it may be ineffective at this point of time, when people do not get to meet. A suggestion would be to work towards the vision for "every student to be a peer supporter". This would mean that all students would have to take up peer helping training, on top on the existing basic mental health literacy in schools, and know the resources to refer friends to seek help, if they hear of any friends in need.

Some considerations: Would students (and schools) take mental health and caring for others as a priority subject, over academics? Peer supporting training would have to be maintained, and hence time in school may have to be used to discuss helping strategies, experiences of helping, and/or sharing of their own stressful situations. Would there be an allowance of school time and money to do this? This may also mean more work for teachers to coordinate the sessions, and/or money spent to engage vendors to moderate the sessions. .

b) Teachers are usually the main contact persons for students, and hence probably the first persons needed to react if something happens in school. I do agree on the point of providing teachers with training of mental health literacy, and hence they can watch out for students who may be distressed. However if a teacher was to oversee a large class size of more than 30 students, it may be difficult to truly focus on each and every student's well-being. As a teacher having teaching duties, projects, and/or committee duties, etc., it may only be possible to take a reactive stance, rather than a proactive stance, towards understanding the students' stressors and mental health status.

With the recommendation of more teachers taking up roles of teacher-counsellors, it would also mean more training, more work, and more meetings to attend whenever it comes to student matters for the nominated teachers. It has to be noted that their primary roles are still teaching, and hence the workload of teaching may still remain.

Recommendations: We need to acknowledge that teachers are human too, and hence also prone to stress. Considering that teachers are very stretched in terms of work, it may be quite important to consider their mental health too. There could be arrangements in their workload, especially if they need to mentor their students and have personal conversations with each of them, or even take up the roles of teacher-counsellor. Teacher-counsellors will also need to maintain their training or receive adequate supervision for their counselling work with students, which means more time taken from teaching work. Would this mean that more staff or teachers may have to be employed, to take up the other roles outside of teaching?

c) Full-time counsellors are also an essential part of the mental health eco-system. However, similar to the teachers, for some counsellors, they may be involved some projects or committee work, on top of their primary work of counselling. This may result in counsellors having not enough time to conduct effective counselling sessions, especially in schools with only one counsellor.

Recommendations: The proposed measure was to have more counsellors in schools; however how many is enough? Probably a study to understand the maximum number of students to one counsellor would be done to understand the optimum student:counsellor ratio, assuming that the counsellor's fulltime load is to attend only to students' needs. More staff can be employed to support the counsellor, and/or work on the mental health initiatives in school, rather than loading these work to the counsellors or teachers.

Personally, I would recommend to build a culture of caring and mental health in school, and make mental health a priority within the school. However, at this juncture of 2021, it would be best to assume that everyone in the eco-system is stressed, and hence more strategies to build a mental health culture is very important now. With that culture in place, students may be more willing to share their issues with friends, teachers, and even counsellors. It may also result in less stressed students and staff in the school.

Another recommendation would be to have open and nonjudgmental conversations with students on topics that youths may be interested to discuss or learn more of. Mental health used to be one of these"taboo" topics until recent times, as more youth started to be more explore their own mental health issues. Probably we should discuss more of these "taboo" topics in schools so as to allow students to have more awareness towards the topics, and build trust and openness within students and staff? One example of such a topic may be the importance of academics for building their future careers, or the understanding one's self as a youth.

One of the overarching debates for the schools that may surface is that of the increase of resources (time, money, employing more staff, etc.) needed for building a good mental health eco-system versus shifting the mental health efforts to the current staff and students. However, is the final result of our students having a good and healthy mental health, for their each and individual futures, not worth the fundings?

Let me end with a quote from the Education Minister Mr Chan's ministerial statement on this matter:

To establish a caring and enabling society that gives greater attention to the well-being of our young.

*The above discussion and opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of any organisations that I am associated to.