When I was in elementary school, students who exhibited anxiety were separated a bit as teachers encouraged them to walk down the school hallway to the nurse’s office, where they were isolated from their peers. There was little the nurse could do – offer a phone call home, a sticker, a reminder to breathe.
I recounted this experience when I was a high school student after losing my father to breast cancer. Struggling with grief, I too was pulled aside for whispered conversations in the hallway, the kind of heartfelt but harassed condolences offered by teachers who didn’t know what to say.
In those moments, I felt different. And perfectly aware of the discomfort of adults.
It’s no secret youth mental health is in crisis. The teachers aren’t doing well either. Experience of educators significantly higher rates depression than the general population. Almost 50 percent leave the class within five years. Teaching is considered as stressful as work as an emergency room doctor.
Related: Mental health: is it a job for schools?
The stakes are high: in the United States, two-thirds of children are affected by traumawhich can modify brain connectivityfunction and structure – And physical and mental health adulthood. In 2020, almost eight million children had diagnoses of anxiety and depression, and in 2021, three in five high school students identifying as female in the United States reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”
Yet, too often, educators receive no training in mental health – that of young people or their own – during their university studies. To truly foster well-being in the learning space, it’s time to close this gap.
Of course, mental health support must involve trained interventionists; we should not position teachers as such. Yet access to mental health staff is rare; school counselors balance an average workload of 408 students and are often overburdened with administrative responsibilities that leave little room for mental health support. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. districts a school psychologist is missing quite.
Educators experience significantly higher rates of depression than the general population.
That leaves teachers on the front lines, which might be even more problematic than we thought: Researchers have discovered a reciprocal relationship between student and teacher well-being. A contributing factor to teacher stress may be exposure to student difficulties, which can lead to secondary traumaor “compassion fatigue,” which reflects PTSD.
Likewise, the phenomenon of “stress contagion” shows that students in classrooms where teachers self-report high levels of burnout wake up with elevated cortisol levels, a key stress hormone that can impact development. Studies also show that teachers serve as attachment figures in young people’s lives, meaning that the way teachers respond and interact with students, particularly in times of stress, can impact both the way students interact with others as well as the how they expect to be treated by others over time. This means that teachers’ stressors may undermine their ability to build supportive relationships with students, thereby complicating students’ own experiences and expectations of attachment.
Related: A Surprising Cure for Teens in Mental Health Crisis
It is therefore urgent that teachers know how best to respond to their own and others’ challenges and model productive coping strategies that can serve students in the long term.
President Biden proposed $1 billion in federal funding to hire mental health professionals and establish suicide prevention programs in schools, but teacher training has not yet been addressed.
THE Council for Accreditation of Teacher Preparation requires teacher preparation programs to cover diversity, equity and inclusion – but not mental health, despite the interconnectedness of the topics. Young people from marginalized backgrounds are increased risk for mental health issues, for example, and marginalized communities have less access toand are less likely to choose to access mental health care due to systemic inequities and stigma.
To address this, teachers need training in mental health as well as issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Incorporating basic awareness into teacher training about anxiety, depression, and trauma is important, as is teaching about ways of speaking on mental health with young people and strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for the classroom. This will provide teachers with tools to identify and respond to students when they need help most and connect them with additional support.
Better understanding of vicarious trauma and its traffic signsalong with intervention guidance, will also prepare teachers to begin their careers with increased self-awareness and the ability to name and destigmatize a part of the profession that is dominant, but rarely identified.
Pilot programs addressing teacher mental health have shown promising results. For example, districts that paid for teachers to undergo therapy reported that “none of the teachers quit before feeling well emotionally. Of the teachers who provided feedback, 100 percent reported an improvement in their personal well-being. . . (and) that the experience had a positive impact on the well-being, mental health and academic performance of their students.
This idea of therapist-teacher support echoes supervision model in psychological training in which novice therapists meet regularly with experienced therapists to process the emotional toll of their work and discuss professional strategies and approaches.
Although some schools have instituted mentoring programs for first-year teachers, this model is not used everywhere, generally does not take emotions into account, and its one-year duration is often insufficient.
We need a new ethic of education training that gives teachers the tools to support themselves and their students in times of stress. This involves making sure they understand the principles of trauma-informed care — safety, connection, and emotional regulation — and how to center these principles to help care for themselves and their students.
Adult well-being is important before and during professional practice, as is recognizing the direct relationship between the emotional states of teachers and their students. If we mandate mental health training, we can make school a safer place for students and teachers – a place where grief, anxiety and stress are not relegated to whispers in the hallways but rather harnessed as powerful moments of learning, connection and support.
Brittany R. Collins is the author of “Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students”, as well as more than 50 articles on mental health and education. Learn more about his work at www.brittanyrcollins.com Or @griefresponsiveteaching on Instagram.
This story about teachers and mental health was produced by The Hechinger report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register for The Hechinger newsletter.
