On mental illness and identity
Are schools complicit in the emerging mental health 'crisis'?
I am a huge fan of Freddie deBoer. Not only does he share my politics, but he was an educator, with a PhD in assessment practices in a past life. He writes frequently about his battles with bipolar disorder and even though education is not the mainstay of his output, I think his background and experience make his newsletter really interesting for educators.
His latest piece is on a topic that I have been struggling to articulate without sounding callous. He has given me an impetus to raise some of the concerns I have about our young people, and those concerns are not technically about any kind of mental health ‘crisis’ as we often see claimed. His piece is derived from a highly articulate Reddit thread written by someone who experiences significant mental ill-health. If you’re remotely involved in pastoral care, I highly recommend that you read the whole thing, but here is a choice snip (as published), that I think satisfies as a Tl;dr:
Our youngest generations' understanding of mental health enables, encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity.
Accountability is absent to the nth degree. But more importantly, a lack of any accountability has deprived these people of personal empowerment and agency. Mental illness is no longer something to recover from and fight against. It is an identity and a definition of life itself. There is no reason to seek "cures" (which of course is borderline nonexistent in mental health but thats a whole essay ifself), there is no reason to look to better ourselves. There is no reason to fight our internal struggles at a personal level, without feeling the need to informt every last member of the community whom we interact with. This is not only society's problem, but our peers'.
Rather than make a series of claims, I am going to raise a series of questions. I think these are really worth asking in education, whatever our role. My questions do suggest a point of view, but I can’t claim to know the depth and breadth of complexities in every context. I do think we could apply the same critical lens that we apply to our classroom practice as we do our role as pastoral carers and promoters of well-being. This critical reflection is too rare.
Do we treat mental health as a treatable condition in our interactions with parents and students, in our PEPs and pastoral care plans, and in our plans for examination provisions? Or do we treat mental health with fatalism, putting students on a certain path to ‘disability’? You can make inferences about sector based approaches to disability provisions by reading this. I remember hearing child psychologist Judith Locke talk about this early in my career and having my mind blown. Others were similarly moved but then we all promptly forgot her emphatic messages about treatable conditions and got on with filing our NESA documentation.
Do we follow through with our assessment policies, holding students to high expectations? Or are our expectations immediately lower for students with a PEP for social/emotional issues? Do we preach resilience and then remove natural consequences for lateness and disorganisation? Will the world do this for these students? Do we challenge the low expectations of our parent communities?
Who benefits from the well-being industry? Teachers are increasingly asked to use evidence-based practice but not so for consultants and external providers. Perhaps we need to think about the extent to which the well-being industry encroaches on instructional time, creating an increasingly dominant discourse that reinforces mental illness as an identity and saturates otherwise healthy students. At the very least we need to ask whether this industry is adding value.
In other cases, where funds for externals are not available, teachers are increasingly asked to act as generalists, stepping in as amateur psychologists and applying whatever personal attitudes they bring about mental health and illness to the situation at hand. Teachers have the power to support, validate, challenge, not based on professional knowledge and understanding, but through the lens of whatever personal experience and ideology they come with.
I suppose my overarching question is whether school communities have normalised and integrated mental ill-health to the point that it’s no longer something to work on. There are certainly benefits to reducing stigma around mental health but I do think the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Wearing mental ill-health as an identity can become a kind of free-pass for life. I have shared Freddie’s article widely and one of the comments that has come back to me again and again is the way that this culture diminishes the hard work of people with significant issues, who work every day to meet commitments and act with agency1.
I’m going to leave Freddie with the last word because, frankly, I can’t say it any better.
More than anything, what these young people fail to understand is the regret. They don’t understand the regret, they don’t know what it means to live with it, all day, every day. They are idealistic and ignorant enough to think that their disorders remove the culpability that produces regret; for many of them, this denial of responsibility appears to be a key part of the attraction. But it doesn’t work that way. Over time, as you age, abstract questions of control and blame fall away, and what you’re left with is the accumulation of broken relationships and things you can never take back. A 19-year-old on TikTok might look at her peers and their talk of borderline personality disorder and see glamour and a kind of pain that society might recognize. But if so afflicted someday that 19-year-old will be in her mid-30s and will look back and see the human wreckage that has accrued, and there will be nothing like glamour or fun, only the grubby slow unfinishable business of trying to stay medicated and alive. They don’t understand the regret, these kids. They don’t understand the regret.
But someday, if they really are sick, they will.
Please think carefully before assuming I have never been one of these people.