By Patience
If you look at your school program or your classes, you won’t find anything dedicated to mental health or disorders. A large portion of children in schools tend to have some form of disorder but nobody talks about it. As of now, many states in America only allow children to sign themselves up for therapy or get a psychological evaluation when they’re around 17 or 18. Most children in the US with these disorders don’t always have access to therapy or other trusted ways to get help. In this article I am going to discuss why learning about mental health should be taught as a mandatory subject in school and why it would benefit children’s learning.
According to the CDC page for Children’s mental health 1 in every 5 children in the US experience some type of mental disorder and around 10% of children suffer from learning disabilities such as Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and autism. Around 7.7 million recorded children and teens have some type of mental disorder, but only half of these children are properly diagnosed and treated, but the other half don’t get any treatment and because of the lack of schools teaching their students about the symptoms and what mental disorders there are. Children who go undiagnosed don’t know that there may be a way to help them, this can result in the children having poor self-esteem, bad coping mechanisms and low grades and motivation.
This ignorance towards mental disorders is also commonly found in teachers. Some kids will try to reach out to their teacher and tell them what’s going on, hoping for some way of assistance, but a lot of teachers will tend to ignore them and think they are just trying to get out of class. This is probably because these teachers weren’t taught about mental disorders just like their students. They may spread harmful advice to their students that can result in their self-esteem declining and causing more stress.
We shouldn’t always have to rely on authority figures to help others with mental illnesses. By teaching all the children about mental illnesses and making it a mandatory class will motivate kids to do better at it since it would be a core class that is a very important chunk of their grade. Another important part of making it a mandatory class is letting the students help their classmates; if a student is struggling with a mental illness but won’t speak up about it, the other students will be able to observe the signs and try to reach out and help them.
Some students with these mental illnesses and learning disorders who are comfortable with talking about it can help educate the other students without it or who may be struggling with it and tell them about some things that are common misconceptions or things that they may not have known about it otherwise.
With a new subject at high demand there would be more people who could get a job teaching children and improving their overall grades and class behavior. Kids who are getting proper education, treatment, and healthy coping mechanisms are found to have an increase in optimism, energy level, concentration, dependability, and overall performance. More children would feel better going to school if they were getting proper help and advice from their teachers. Many children tend to have heightened stress levels during school and their mental health deteriorates over time, but schools tend to ignore this fact and continue to make kids do the same work and make them feel bad when they get overwhelmed and struggle in their classes.
Kids and teens tend to have common misconceptions about mental illnesses, mainly ODC, ADHD, anxiety, and depression. A lot of children who aren’t educated can also spread harmful information or minimize these illnesses and confuse the medias interpretation from the actual symptoms.
OCD is commonly confused with perfectionism; this of course is not true and is very different. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and is very different from perfectionism. Some examples of these compulsive tendencies that I experience are touching hot pans or lamps, tapping objects, holding buttons down on my keyboard, and doing tasks in a very specific order. As you can probably tell, OCD is very different from being a perfectionist or being annoyed by minor things like asymmetry.
ADHD is commonly known by people as a mental disorder but is more commonly referred by practitioners as a behavioral disorder or a learning difference. From what I’ve heard form others (insert interview her), ADHD is known to be as a mental illness that makes kids hyperactive and inattentive; This is not completely wrong, but it is different in the way of how it looks and what it feels like to experience the symptoms in school or in a high stress environment. People with ADHD tend to experience symptoms such as zoning out, not being able to sit still for long, having trouble paying attention, sensory overloads, and episodes that tend to fuse all these together at once. A lot of people tend to have fidget toys, some of them they just bring and some fidgets to use that they got specific access to use in class to use to focus. Fidget toys are used as a small toy that we use to help us focus. It’s used as an outlet for any pent-up energy to use so that we can focus on what someone is saying or concentrating on a task that requires sitting still.
Depression is a mental illness that is more joked about, and it’s not too bad until someone self-diagnoses themselves. A lot of people with depression with try to ask for help and tell people how they feel, but some people will discredit by saying that they remember a time that they were happy and that they aren’t crying all the time. Depression is an illness that makes people lose motivation in simple everyday tasks such as getting water or food or even getting out of bed. People with depression aren’t incapable of feeling a happy, it more has to do with some intrusive thoughts and missing the point of caring for self-care or finding motivation in doing things that they would usually do or find enjoyment in doing. If there is anything that you think I didn’t talk about in this section that you would like to be added to the article, please tell us.
I wanted to use this article to talk about some of the common mental illnesses that have been misconstrued by the media, and I want to educate people about the real experience of having them.
There is a lot more that could be discussed about in this topic, but I suggest maybe researching it yourself to answer any questions you may have. There is a lot to this topic that I could talk about, but I believe that it should be teachers teaching us more about it instead.