Trauma Everywhere: How Schools' Mental Health Programs Promote Fragility
An infantilizing, feelings-focused culture
Dear Coddling Movie Community
You really enjoyed Katy McPherson’s first contribution to this Substack, and I’m happy to announce that, starting today, we’ll be bringing you more of her work.
Many well-meaning parents and teachers see mental health programs as an important way to keep kids happy and strong. But what if the programs do more harm than good?
Please read Katy’s illuminating piece, then check out her Substack and follow KIDS FIRST on Facebook.
All the best,
Ted
More and more teachers and school counselors are taking on the role of parent and/or therapist in kids’ lives. Therapeutic education, in which “social emotional learning” (SEL) is a critical element, requires teachers to spend classroom time facilitating therapeutic discussions with students.
Rather than learning to set aside their feelings in order to complete important tasks, children are being taught to measure and assess their emotions, to express them, and even to be guided by them.
As a result, schoolchildren are not learning that emotions are unreliable. They are not learning to be skeptical that their feelings reflect an accurate picture of the world. They are not learning the essential life skill of ignoring their emotions entirely.
In addition, K12 teachers lack both the training and professional ethics of licensed therapists. Often, students’ emotional concerns arise that teachers are simply unequipped to handle. Not to mention, any subsequent classwork requiring mental focus is rendered impossible due to children’s natural tendency to ruminate.
Teachers label any upsetting event “trauma.” Kids are quick to adopt such catastrophizing verbiage and wield it for the social currency it has unfortunately become.
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The focus on students’ mental health during the school day contributes to kids’ perceived mental fragility. Educators communicate to kids that the world they inhabit is dark and unsafe. In fact, the world is such a dangerous place that time must be carved out in the school day to check in on everyone’s trauma levels.
Kids are getting the message that it would be abnormal if they weren’t traumatized by this dark world.
School surveys often ask students to consider their own mental health. Raising these questions again and again reinforces the idea that students should have mental health problems.
A recent study authored by researchers from Oxford University and the UK’s National Centre for Children and Families asked the question: “Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems?”
The researchers conducting the study present the hypothesis that mental health awareness efforts, like the kinds used in schools, are contributing to the reported increase in mental health problems. They call this phenomenon the “prevalence inflation hypothesis.”
Some key points:
“Research indicates that at least some individuals experience an increase in mental health symptoms as a result of learning about these symptoms.”
“There is also some relevant experimental evidence that covertly telling people they are experiencing symptoms leads them to subsequently report more of those symptoms.”
“These findings are relevant for understanding potential harmful consequences of awareness efforts because, almost by definition, awareness efforts educate people about potential symptoms and encourage them to notice and report them.”
“If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them — and this is especially true for young people who frequently receive mental health information in schools — then it makes sense that they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens.”
“For some individuals, the psychoeducation aspect of interventions or psychological therapy is extremely helpful, and enables them to access vital support and treatment. But if there is evidence from other contexts that learning about mental health problems sometimes causes or exacerbates distress, then it is a reasonable (and urgent) hypothesis that exactly the same phenomenon is taking place on a much wider scale as a result of mental health awareness efforts in schools.”
“As the prevalence of mental health problems increases, schools respond by disseminating more awareness-raising information to help individuals identify difficulties and access support. But these efforts themselves might lead to an increase in prevalence rates via the mechanisms described above.”
“… Findings indicate that the relationship between the two constructs is not only cyclical but escalates: as prevalence rates increase, awareness efforts increase in response, but then prevalence rates increase further as a result and the cycle continues.”
Of course, there are children and teens in our nation’s schools who are genuinely traumatized, abused, neglected, use drugs, and worse. K12 schools can and often do successfully identify at-risk children and youth, and in partnership with other agencies and to the degree that they are able, assess these kids’ needs and get them aid.
This post is not about those kids.
This post is about all the rest.
Because, as author Abigail Shrier says in her book Bad Therapy, school-based mental health has “gone airborne.” In the name of prevention, administrators target whole school populations rather than focusing help on children who demonstrate a need.
The result? More kids are reporting mental health issues than ever before.
In sum, we should get mental health out of K12. It’s not good for kids:
The therapeutic education model subverts learning. It provides children with a way to avoid doing the hard tasks they are confronted with in school.
Attending to students’ feelings creates self-sabotaging behaviors. Kids employ avoidance tactics like exaggerating a current hardship, or claiming victim status or emotional fragility when classroom learning is difficult or uninteresting.
In any discussion of students’ mental health, the focus will always fixate on adverse experiences. This compels kids to ruminate on negative feelings, sapping them of the mental energy required to tackle learning tasks.
Blame for bad feelings will always land on parents. Kids learn that adult strangers who work in schools are more trustworthy than their own families. This belief makes children vulnerable to abuse.
Teachers and school counselors are not trained or licensed to help kids process trauma. The therapeutic processes they imprudently employ will likely make children’s mental health worse.
Most importantly, prompting children to share about their emotional traumas makes the classroom something other than a place for learning.
A classroom that fosters student learning in essential academic skills should be laser-focused on academic curriculum content — not on feelings. The classroom should be a place for learning.
For more from Katy McPherson, check out
, where this post originally appeared. | A guest post by
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I miss the days when the standard response was “Suck it up, buttercup!”
And can we emphasize how important it is to distinguish that "therapeutic" approaches may affect BOYS and GIRLS differently?!! There is a gender difference. And when nearly ALL the teachers that may enjoy talking about feelings and "trauma" with their students (b/c they probably need their own friends to pyschobabble with), when most of these teachers are FEMALE - I'm pretty sure all the male students and probably lots of the female students just check out. Is it no wonder boys just hate school?
I see it in action - how my son deals with "conflicts" between his sports teammates. It is totally different than what a girl would do.
I know when I was a student, I would NOT want to talk to my teachers about my "problems."
**this also reflects a very traditional Asian ethos - that you don't brownnose to your teachers by talking about anything other than the school work. Everything must strictly be based on "merit." You would never talk about anything personal with your teachers - b/c if you did complain about something at home, you would be seen as WEAK and making excuses. But this mentality seems to have disappeared - even amongst Asian-Americans. Thanks for softening us up America! LOL.