Mental health: When times are tough

If identifying teenagers with mental health problems can be hard, supporting them in the classroom can be harder.

In an ideal world, there would be a strong network of other professionals alongside you in helping such individuals – but this isn’t always an ideal world. 

Even if a school does provide formal assistance, it is often intermittent. It is still the classroom teacher, the professional on the front-line who is faced with the moment-to-moment challenges of supporting the troubled student. 

So, a mental health problem has been identified. What happens next? Ideally, in serious cases the health services will take over, the individual will be rapidly hospitalised and given expert help. Schools don’t have the resources to manage those with major mental illnesses, and such individuals should not be left to flounder on in our classrooms – though that does happen.