Amy Nam is the executive director of the Reclamation Project and a high-school student in Toronto.
If Ontario’s student mental-health support system was an electrical circuit, its fuse would have blown more than a year ago.
Not only did students lose sleep – literally and figuratively – over grades and the usual academic stressors, the pandemic introduced new worries: about sick loved ones, social isolation, family job insecurity, personal health. The result for many was a monotonous and lonely daily life, with countless late nights and early mornings hunched over our desks, overburdened and overworked. It’s no surprise, then, that Ontario students in virtual classrooms – who spent the most time learning that way of any students in Canada – experienced higher rates of depression and anxiety as the lockdown persisted.
Under this pandemic-induced weight, mental-health support systems in schools crumbled. But their foundations were already unstable.
Even before Canada reported its first COVID-19 case, the mental health of students had been deteriorating. A 2020 survey by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that one in six students in grades 7 to 12 had seriously considered suicide, with one in five experiencing critical psychological distress. Another survey discovered that, in 2019, half as many schools reported having access to psychologists than they did just three years prior.
Earlier this year, when I worked with members of the Toronto Youth Cabinet (TYC) to survey Ontario students about their mental health, an overwhelming number of respondents brought life to these troubling statistics. “I tried reaching out for help, but my situation was disregarded and dealt with in an ineffective and lazy manner,” one student said. Another said “the lack of consideration for the mental health of students is appalling and disgusting.” Perhaps the most extreme: “School is hell, and all of us are burning in it.”
Reimagining these support systems is a daunting but urgent task that will require significant funding and collaboration between government officials, districts, students, teachers and mental-health professionals. There is no perfect path to follow, but as the pandemic continues with the return to school around the corner, we must take the first steps in the right direction.
To do so, we can look to other jurisdictions for guidance on building more empathetic learning environments. After all, the classrooms that thrived before and during the pandemic were ones in which teachers developed strong relationships, regularly checked in and designed classroom policies with students to better fit their needs. To that end, Maryland’s largest school district, for example, now allows students to cite mental-health concerns as a valid excuse for an absence.
In Singapore, the Ministry of Education recently announced that all teachers will undergo professional development on mental-health literacy. Ninety-eight per cent of TYC respondents expressed support for a similar initiative in Ontario, which the government would ideally mandate and fund. In the meantime, school staff can take advantage of the numerous training resources that are available. One such tool is Stan Kutcher and Yifeng Wei’s comprehensive mental health literacy curriculum, which schools can access online or through the University of British Columbia.
But while well-trained teachers and guidance counsellors are important, they can’t bear the brunt of student support alone. It’s not the job for which they signed up and trained. Rather, Ontario schools can take a page from the Miami-Dade County school district, which plans to invest federal relief funds into more mental-health clinicians. On-campus psychologists are vital for providing personalized support that best addresses student’s problems; perhaps even more importantly, psychologists should be available to connect with students at any hour of the school day.
Mental-health support should also continue in our homes. While there are numerous ways for parents to approach discussions about it, professionals can encourage parents to listen to and validate their child’s struggles, brainstorm healthy coping mechanisms such as journaling or resting and assist in the pursuit of professional help if negative symptoms persist – all with a nonjudgmental and open-minded tone.
The return to in-person schooling is highly anticipated, but it will undoubtedly present challenging adjustments to everyone involved in teaching and learning. Despite our excitement to return to some degree of normalcy, we must upend the norms for mental-health support in our education systems – which too often means sending one vague platitude-filled e-mail to students about self-care and calling it a day – once the pandemic is finally over.
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