Mental Health Natters

20/10/2024

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12/10/2024

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Several parents have told me that they’ve seen a psychologist who has advised against removing their child from school, saying that this will only increase their anxiety. I’ve seen this advice in books for professionals – books on ‘school refusal’ will claim that allowing a child to stop attending school and seeking another way to learn will cause all sorts of anxiety issues to get worse.

As a past ‘school refuser’ myself, I have a different perspective. I really disliked school at two times in my life. Both times, I was not scared of school. I hated it. I hated the way it made me feel, the way the other students behaved towards me and the way that it felt like I was wasting my time. I only became anxious because I was being made to attend school.

It’s true that avoiding things that make you anxious will sometimes make a person more anxious about that thing. Avoiding dogs will not resolve a dog phobia and might make things worse. Graded exposure can be a really useful tool in reducing anxiety which has got out of control.

School attendance problems are not the same as a dog phobia.

There’s an important distinction between anxiety which is irrational (like a dog phobia which means the child is terrified of all dogs, even a sausage dog), and feeling anxious about being made to do something that you really dislike. In the first case, the problem is fear which is out of proportion to the dog. In the second case, the problem is that you really dislike something and you are being made to do it.

With the dog phobia, it makes sense to say ‘stop avoiding dogs’. The child will learn that dogs aren’t as scary as they think, and their anxiety will reduce.

If we treat school in the same way, then it has the potential to make the problem worse. Because if you force someone to go into a school where they are deeply unhappy repeatedly, then they may well get more, not less, anxious about it. Unhappiness and dislike of school does not respond well to exposure therapy. The child may become hopeless and rather than learning that school isn’t as bad as they think, they may learn that no one is listening.

I meet children like this. Those who have been forced into school because someone said that it would make things worse if alternatives were explored. Sometimes they get on a downwards spiral and stop doing anything. They shut themselves in their bedrooms.

In order to help these children, we have to think differently about education. We have to stop assuming that the treatment for school anxiety is more school. We have to ask ourselves whether our education system is a place where every child can thrive, and if not, we should ask ourselves what we could do better.

23/08/2024

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What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time.

We make them spend several years learning things that they often have no interest in, that they have not chosen and that they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important.

Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.

We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame.

We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home.

We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and under pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this.

Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether.

Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged.

What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people?

Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?

Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we do then?