Net Exchange Response


Title: What can teachers do to support students with mental health concerns?

Date Posted: 6/27/2011

Question: “What mental health concerns should teachers look for? What can they do if they suspect a mental health problem in a student, such as depression, anxiety, or a related concerns? What should teachers do if they think that a child is going through a trauma?”

Response: Support for teachers as they address the many barriers to student learning always needs to be a high priority in staff capacity building. The problem, of course, is how to get it out of the margins when it comes to school improvement planning and practices. Given that this matter is being worked on, there are many resources available for enhancing teacher understanding and action. A good starting place to find aids for staff development is our Online Clearinghouse Quick Finds – http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/quicksearch.htm . There are Quick Finds on the matters cited above and on most topics of concern related to students’ emotional, behavioral, and learning problems.

With specific reference to the above questions, below are a few cautions and comments:

What mental health concerns should teachers look for?

As our early research found, teachers are good at identifying students who are not doing well. They quickly identify students with behavior problems; they see students who are unsuccessful in class and see the emotional overlay that results. Teachers are often frustrated by the lack of immediate support for these students.
This points to the irony of the push to formally screen such mental health concerns as depression and suicide. Most teachers and student support staff are painfully aware of students who are troubled and troubling. Identification is not a big problem (and formal screening always over-identifies common problems of sadness, frustration, and anxiety). The big problem is that there are seldom appropriate programs in place to respond once students are identified. In our work, we encourage student support staff to move into classrooms to assist teachers in strengthening the support for students of concern as a step in deciding the nature and scope of the problem. Often the primary need is to make changes in the learning environment.

What can they do if they suspect a mental health problem in a student, such as depression, anxiety, or a related concern?

The student support staff at the school or district is the first line resource. The first step could be to invite student and learning supports personnel (e.g., the school counselor, school psychologist, school social worker) into the classroom to get to know the students and look for natural opportunities to enhance the success of students in learning and social interactions. Should more be needed, the student and learning supports staff can use what they learned from working with the student to begin the process of finding special and specialized assistance.

What should teachers do if they think that a child is going through trauma?

The concept of "trauma" is going through some transformation. There is a group who believe that the high and constant level of traumatic stress that some students, especially in poor urban schools, experience should be seen as eligible for the label "post traumatic stress syndrome."
Another group mainly stresses the importance of the school working to outreach to families, to help strengthen the social safety net in the community, and to advocate for economic opportunities to strengthen the community. The teacher’s focus in all this should be on continuing to provide personalized support and guidance in the classroom and work with student and learning supports staff to develop appropriate social and emotional supports and accommodations as necessary.

Beyond the Above Questions:

We stress that mental health in schools should be embedded into a Comprehensive System of Learning Supports with every school having a Learning Supports Component. This approach places mental health efforts into the context of addressing barriers to teaching and learning and re-engaging disconnected students. As we stressed in a recent policy brief (online at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/embeddingmh.pdf ):
“The time has come for ending the counterproductive competition that arises from efforts that push separate, narrow agenda for student and learning supports. No single program or service can address the range of factors interfering with equity of opportunity to succeed at school for the large number of students affected. And the competition for resources resulting from separate advocacy for such programs and services, such as those associated with mental health in schools, is contributing to the continuing marginalization and resultant fragmentation of such endeavors and the fact that they reach only a small proportion of the many students who should be beneficiaries.
The bottom line in terms of policy is that it is time to adopt a comprehensive concept such as learning supports as the umbrella under which those who push for expanding the focus on mental (and physical) health must learn to embed themselves. A health agenda (and especially a clinical health agenda) by itself is too narrow to fit into the broad mission of schools in our society and is inadequate for enabling equity of opportunity for all students to succeed at school. We can continue to build a few islands of excellence (demonstrations, pilots) and ‘Cadillac models,’ but with over 90,000 schools in the U.S.A., the scale of need demands moving quickly in fundamentally new directions.”

We are working with state education departments and school districts across the country who are pioneering such an approach. See http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/summit2002/trailblazing.htm


Submit a request or comment now.

UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools
Dept. of Psychology, P.O.Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095.
tel: (310)825-3634
email: Linda Taylor ~ web: https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu