School mental health: the concept

The concept of school mental health is very much wide and multidimensional. The role of teachers in shaping the personality and morale of the child is well recognised since time immemorial, just after the parents or other significant adult caregivers. After home, school provides the child the next platform to develop, flourish, explore his or her own capabilities and correct their weaknesses. Child’s brain is very much receptive and whatever they see, hear, experience, feel or learn in their childhood, keeps in memory for lifelong. Therefore it is very much necessary that we provide our children a very good school environment that is very much stimulating and provides them with good intellectual and emotional nourishments so as to build their personality in a healthy manner and help them to become good citizen of world and also a good human being.

Along with providing good education, school has got a role in child protection, which is now another important birth right of child after ‘education.’[Juvenile Justice Amendment Act 2006] School has the responsibility to provide the child a safe learning environment, protection from bullying and other physical and psychological abuse etc. School also can take an active part in teaching the child how to protect themselves from different risks, first making them aware about these risks, about acceptable limits of physical contact, resisting pressures etc. and then how to deal with these situations in a healthy manner. The initial concept of school mental health consultations was largely derived from the work of Gerald Caplan that was basically a client centred consultation approach by a psychiatrist. It follows different steps like information acquisition, meeting with school staff, student interview, parent interview, feedback meeting with school staff, feedback meeting with student and parent, finally report preparation and guiding for further referral treatment to external service provider. But the confidentiality of the report has to be maintained strictly throughout the course of the process of service providing.

Other different mental health professionals also can be involved in school mental health and they can also play an active role in early identification, primary prevention, and secondary prevention of different child mental health problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mental retardation, conduct disorders, depressive disorder, specific learning disabilities, pervasive developmental disorder (autism), other emotional and neurotic disorders, neuropsychiatric developmental disorder (Tourette’s sundrome), substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse etc. These professionally skilled service providers are primary child mental health worker, special educational needs coordinator (SENCO), educational psychotherapists, education welfare officer (EWO), school nurse, learning mentor, connexions advisers etc.

These mental health human resources form the care strength in providing the school mental health related services especially in UK and other developed countries, but the concept of school mental health is yet to be developed and still is in its infant state and has not gained proper attention from all concerned in our country.

Other than the trained mental health professionals, the teachers also can be sensitised and trained about different child mental health related problems as well as in areas of normal child developmental psychology, so that they also can take active part in school mental health in early identification and prevention of these problems and can understand their strengths and weaknesses being more psychologically oriented by themselves.

In UK, different pilot projects were developed in recent years involving use of mobile phone, internet, textbook to explore the mental health related issues in adolescents and young adults using proformas for ‘frequently asked questions (FAQs)’ and related to often different issues.

Finally, school mental health is the need of the hour and it is now right time for everybody concerned to think seriously over the issue so as to prevent the uprising menace of mental health related disorders in our young children and adolescents so as to make our future nation a healthier one. Through this article, I request all concerned – psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, social workers, educationists, Govt., bureaucrats, teachers, parents and general public to kindly look into the subject with serious concern and start taking the necessary steps from now onwards so as to help our young ones in particular and build the nation and society at large.

Suggested reading

Gelder MG, Andreasen NC, Lopez-Ibor JJ Jr., Geddes JR, editors (2009) New oxford textbook of psychiatry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sadock BJ, Sadock VA, editors (2000) Kaplan & Sadock’s comprehensive textbook of psychiatry. 7th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins