This is part one of a five-part series in which I lay out five steps that I believe to be powerful shifts toward reclaiming common sense, at least as it relates to education and our mental wellbeing.
We’re not in a mental health crisis. We’re also not infected by an absence-of-access-to-mental-health-care plague. Our children are not inherently damaged by virtue of being alive in a world dominated by Silicon Valley. We have a first-world perception problem on the part of fully-developed adult brains. While this may sound reductionist to those invested in the mass-diagnosing of kids, I want to remind readers: it is a good thing that the problem isn’t soaring mental illnesses, but merely our perception of them. A snag in perception is one that can be changed as easily as it was formed.
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I don’t believe our kids are experiencing more anxiety or depression than previous years. Their challenges may be different because they’ve been forcefully spoon-fed ideas about the tragedy that is emotional pain. Our efforts to control how they feel have predictably backfired, which paints the illusion that they’re experiencing symptoms only manageable by professionals, like psychotherapists and psychiatrists. I also believe we’ve inaccurately deemed social media the defenseless fool, but I suppose that’s a problem for an entirely separate series.
But Kayla, if we fail to tend to our kids’ and our clients’ emotional health, aren’t we dismissing their very personhood? Aren’t we being dismissive of how they feel in a manner similar to how Boomers suppressed their every emotion, making them calloused and transactional in relationships? No and no. Because, once again, the problem is not our children’smental health. I have a more important question we’re terrified to answer, one which first requires us to admit that children have not really changed.
What HAS changed? The adults in the room.
Their identity. Their rigidity and their perfectionism (even though we all gently remind one another it’s okay to not be okay and to be imperfect.) The sense of urgency they’ve involuntarily adopted because their administrator or boss or clinical director said it was important and compassionate and trauma-informed. Their insistence that robbing a child’s self-esteem to boost their own is a romantic gesture of “care”. In defense of many of today’s educators and therapists, though…. They’re terrified. They’re terrified because of professionals like me, and a culture who warns them that any wrong statement or a question stated in a voice that sounds like Uncle Dave will squelch a kid’s spirit and ruin them for life. Believe you me: we are all actually quite fine, and will be quite fine--- we just have to believe it. And we have to think for ourselves despite all the theatrics and the “misinformation” regarding trauma and stress.
We’ve known for some time that the rat race toward glee is futile. It’s precisely this reason that I strongly suggest a few changes to how we’re addressing this “mental health crisis”.
1. DITCH THE IDEA THAT WE’RE IN A MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
2. GET ‘MENTAL HEALTH’ OUT OF SCHOOLS AND DROP THE GOD COMPLEX
3. SKILL-BUILDING OVER SYMPTOM MANAGEMENT
4. CASH-ONLY, ACUTE SERVICES
5. BRING IT BACK TO THE COMMUNITIES
This piece will be a five-parter in which I’ll delve into each of my five steps in greater depth. This introduction piece, then, will explain the first step: ditching the notion that we’re in crisis.
Firstly, we must radically shift the manner in which we label first-world problems. Our “mental health”, which we tout as if it’s a Gucci purse, is not a brand of social prestige. Like David Bidler’s Physiology First initiative reminds readers, “Mental health isn’t something we have. It’s something we do.” Modern therapy, specifically those initiatives spreading across American schools, demand an emotional investment in our own suffering. It accomplishes this rumination by constant weaving of psychological terms into academic instruction, putting “Calm Down Corners” in classrooms in the case a child is “overwhelmed” or “anxious”, and asking teachers to function as both educator and counselor. My “method”, similar to Bidler’s, requires the erasure of vapid initiatives and a turning of the dial back toward the self. Teachers get to focus on teaching, and students who have a problem with it will be redirected to look inward.
Self-reliance is how we overcome most any problem, whether situational or internal. Our turmoil does not result from our circumstances or an absence of mental health initiatives, but the story we assign to such turmoil. Perhaps learning more thoroughly the evidence of the story, then, is worth trying. We abandon the notion of a “mental health crisis” and all of its fruitless campaigns, and instead teach children about their brain and their physical health. We remind them that our default in the face of crisis, like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, is resilience. We rely heavily on teaching history, if not for basic intelligence then to emphasize the adaptability of humans across millennia. The brain’s development and its history provide compelling evidence that we’re capable, competent individuals in the face of most any challenge. “You can do hard things” needs to be more than an adorable laptop sticker.
To illustrate how a lesson plan may go, we turn to the truly magical power of placebo effects. Placebo effects occur regularly and in a manner still somewhat mystical to psychology researchers. Our belief in something is powerful enough to change our behavior and even our physiology, despite there being no active ingredient or change agent in the intervention. As a shocking example, we look to an experiment conducted between two groups in a psychology research lab. One group was told they would be rubbed with a leaf of poison ivy, and that their skin may break out in hives because of the poison. The leaf itself was not poison ivy; they were only told it was. The second group was simply told they’d be experiencing textural differences between different types of leaves. Alas, the first group broke out into hives, simply because the information given about potential symptoms of poison ivy (itching skin, which progresses to form hives and spreading rashes, and eventually turns into blisters) was shared at the outset.
The placebo effect shows powerful promise in some of our nation’s most pressing problems, namely its addiction to opioids. The placebo effect luckily does not discriminate between structural or emotional pain, and the outcomes of its use in managing chronic pain are simply profound. Even research participants in chronic pain, who were told at the outset of treatment that they’d be given gelatin placebo pills, saw stark improvements in their perception of pain symptoms. How can this be? For God’s sake, the pill bottle itself had the label “placebo pills” on its face! One word: psychoeducation. Patients found education about the placebo effect so empowering that they were able to harness its benefits in their own mind, realizing their beliefs held enough weight to change their entire experience of pain. And, again--- it’s not only the beliefs that change with the placebo effect. The releasing of dopamine was evident in individuals when taking their placebo pills. We can teach people to craft their own inner pharmacy without any form of medicinal intervention--- and we can give a glaring middle finger to Big Pharma in the process. Self-reliance remains at the core of the “mental health” solution.
I frequently wonder if insisting upon there being a mental health crisis is a placebo effect of its own. What if we told people our mental health was actually improving? Or, at the very least, staying stable? Would we fixate on isolated occurrences of students feeling sad or that one university kid reporting social anxiety? Without such myopic thinking and behavior, would our money and our energy instead go toward building important skills for thriving in adulthood? Like, say, public speaking, conflict resolution, financial planning, self-awareness, physical and nutritional health, breaking and making habits?
When I recommend ditching the idea that we’re in a mental health crisis, I’m met with a lot of support and also some skepticism. “But what about autistic kids?”, “But what about my panic attacks?” The whataboutism is another form of reassurance-seeking that is rewarded with professionals, webinars, pills, and Instagram checklists. I had a parent ask me recently, “I want my kid to be more willing to put away the video games earlier, and not play on them so long. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for how to pitch this idea to my kid?” My response was something like, “Yeah, I’d tell him to stop playing video games or I’m unplugging the Xbox.” This isn’t difficult. It’s only educated, licensed professionals like me who have made it so.
So perhaps we refuse to engage with the whataboutism and instead treat people like they’re competent and capable. What’s the worst that can happen?
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