Going beyond mental health awareness

Unfortunately, most of us fall into the second category. For years now, the talk has been about mental health awareness, when we should be way past that stage. Understanding how mental health skills can be incorporated into our lives has become the more important issue. This is mental health education.

Different countries are at different stages in how they look at mental health. Some are extremely advanced, where people have learned to rely on medication to address even the slightest of problems. Other societies think resilience is the only thing one needs to overcome mental health problems, and the rest will fall into place.

While the Philippines has made some notable progress on the issue, with many more Filipinos now aware of and enlightened about mental health as a genuine and prevalent health concern, it’s also true that we are still not doing enough about it.

Many among the younger generations have begun to be directly affected by the continuing lack of proper mental health care and practices. One way to help address this is through the school setting.

The initiative to create campuses that provide safe spaces not only for students, but also for teachers and administrators, will always have to come from the top — the school owners and managers. They need to acknowledge the need for such an environment first, and adhere to good mental health practices among their own ranks, before they can be equipped to support and sustain a similar space for their young wards.

They may consider three steps to create a safe mental health environment at school:

Set up the appropriate policies and programs. Policies, and the way they are upheld and implemented, are at the heart of every successful program. Building mental health-related events at school, increasing awareness and sensitivity toward the issue and creating a way for students to safely reach out to mental health professionals cannot be one-time, ad-hoc activities, but must become part of the institutional structure and mindset of the school.

Help the helpers. No policy will work if the teachers, administrators and guidance staff are themselves unable to support their own mental health. They would have nothing to extend to students who need similar assistance. To be able to support students effectively, it’s crucial that the elders of the school are first supported, to arm them with the right knowledge and inner strength to then reach out to students in an empathetic way, whether it’s as simple as a check-in before starting a class, or intensive one-on-one sessions with each of the students.

Improve the curriculum and students’ extra-curricular activities. The students’ curricular studies and extracurricular activities at school need to be updated to include the study and development of mental health skills. For the lingering stigma around mental health to be eliminated completely, healthy open discussions about the subject must take place, and extracurricular activities meant to support mental health must also be a primary objective of student organizations.

Ultimately, the world would be a better place when we are free to take mental health breaks whenever needed; where there are resources and care services we can access for specific problems; and when going to a mental health professional for a check-up has become as normal as going to a physician every year for physical examination or to a dentist to have one’s teeth checked.

We can start building this world by starting with the young minds of our children in school — who are, not incidentally, also the most vulnerable to mental health pressures as they grow up in an increasingly more unstable, rudderless world. The best gift we can bequeath to them is a world where compassion and empathy have become the norm such that it’s now second nature for all of us to check on the people we care about and ask, “Hey, how’s your mental health?”