Mindfulness in schools – A help or a hindrance?
Supporting students’ mental health is vital, says Gordon Cairns – but it’s not a task for enthusiastic amateurs…
In the pursuit of historical discovery, well-meaning amateur archaeologists in the 19th century took their picks and dug deep into the artefact-rich soil of Greece, Egypt and Afghanistan, uncovering treasures hidden from the world for millennia and bringing ancient history to life.
Unfortunately, in doing so, their scattergun, destructive methods obliterated much more evidence about how the ancients lived than they uncovered, making their modern-day counterparts despair.
Mental health lessons
I couldn’t help thinking about those well-intentioned yet bumbling diggers when I read a recent report which not only suggests that whole class mindfulness lessons are, at best, merely somewhat effective in the short-term but more worryingly, could even exacerbate existing mental health issues among young people.
The ‘My Resilience in Adolescence’ trial was based on five cluster studies involving over 8,000 students and hundreds of teachers across more than 80 schools that undertook mindfulness training. This involved delivering lessons on how to pay attention and how to understand and manage feelings and behaviour, with a view to boosting resilience, while promoting good mental health.
To non-professionals this might seem an excellent use of resources. In reality, the report found evidence that this approach to developing resilience is weak. While short-term benefits may arise for some (younger children or those with current or developing mental health issues), such lessons should be avoided.
What’s more, the process studied in the trial required a significant resource and time commitment, involving teachers learning mindfulness themselves, then receiving training in how to deliver it to a whole class in 10 lessons of up to 50 minutes.
Negative thoughts
Writing in a recent issue of New Scientist about universal mental health interventions in the classroom [paywall], psychologist, author and adolescent mental health specialist Lucy Foulkes wasn’t surprised by such outcomes: “They sound excellent on paper, but the trouble is, they doesn’t work well in reality. Research shows that when universal lessons do reduce mental health symptoms, the effect is small. On average, teenagers who receive these classes score only slightly lower on measurements of anxiety or depression than those who don’t.”
Dr Foulkes believes there’s an inherent structural weakness at the core of universal mental health lessons: “The whole premise of these classes is that students should notice their negative thoughts and feelings, label them and carry out exercises to try and accept or change them. But it can be really difficult to change how you think and feel, especially without one-to-one support.”
She adds, “School mental health lessons may be inadvertently teaching teenagers to ruminate on negative thoughts and feelings without giving them any real ability to manage these experiences, which could increase their distress.”
One-to-one interventions
This can only add to the sense of frustration felt by many teachers at the rising mental health crisis amongst teenagers, especially with outside support apparently not forthcoming.
However, Dr Foulkes does offer some solutions that may be more fruitful. First, she suggests focusing additional funds and effort into one-to-one interventions, using people actually trained in offering mental health support. Whilst accepting this is often a complex and expensive process, she advocates for more action to be taken on reducing the issues causing teenagers to become vulnerable in the first place, such as bullying or financial insecurity.
Teachers should take heart. While we can flag up teenagers who are struggling with their mental health to the appropriate parties, it’s not for us to solve complex problems we haven’t been trained in, beyond signposting. Let’s not be the well-meaning amateurs who destroyed Homer’s Troy when they should have been trying to preserve it.
Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications
