With yet another UK lockdown underway, mental health has understandably become a huge topic of conversation. People are repetitively referring to the ‘mental health crisis’ that is going on, especially in regards to young people with the continuous changes to their education. However, a mental health crisis has been going on for years, people have just been oblivious to what has really been happening. As somebody who was first diagnosed with a mental illness at 14 (being diagnosed with a total of three illnesses before leaving the education system), I experienced the true extent of the issues that exist in regards to mental health and schools. From stigma to punishment, I really did have my fair share of issues. Change is so important and we are going to fight until change is achieved and lives are saved. This blog aims to explain what problems I personally experienced at school due to my mental health, and the reason why we need change and we need it now.
I was 14, starting year 10. I had a few hard years prior to this with a large amount of family bereavement, and an operation a week or so before returning to school but I was excited to start my GCSEs and the next chapter of my education. This was until one day I fainted. I had never fainted before and it was pretty scary and confusing. The fainting started to become more and more until it was twice a day for multiple minutes at a day at points. Multiple hospital visits ultimately confirmed that it was down to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I was so confused by my diagnosis. Nobody had ever talked to me about mental health before let alone mental illness. With mental health services so stretched in the UK and no other real symptoms, I was advised to not seek help through CAAMHS due to the long waiting lists. Now you think my school would try its best to accommodate a young girl that they knew had been through a hell of a few years and was really struggling, right?
That was not the case. Throughout the time I was fainting, I started to get detentions upon detentions. Some were deserved yes but some definitely were not- my favourite example of this was a detention for not doing enough work in a lesson where I fainted and ended up having to go to A&E in an ambulance. But nobody even bothered to wonder why this 14 year old girl who had NEVER got a detention before was suddenly getting 2 lunchtimes a week. Even when a teacher told me to get over my brother passing away, the pastoral care team at school simply told me “there’s nothing we can do”. The school was treating it like I was just a hormonal teenager not that I was really struggling.
Another factor that made this intensely worse was the stigma from both students and teachers alike. If you have been at school recently, you will know that there are ZERO lessons about mental health. We learn about physical health, sexual health but mental health is the biggest taboo in schools. Half of all mental health problems start before the age of 14 but schools just won’t talk about it. Teachers aren’t educated on the subject and so it’s just a pot luck on how you will get treated. I had a teacher physically block my exit from a classroom and shout at me to breathe during a panic attack. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, it feels like a heart attack. Imagine having a heart attack and someone is just shouting at you “BREATHE”… I don’t think it would really help. Other than that, I was forced to do one counselling session I didn’t want to do at the start when I was fainting, and the support was in no way specialised to what I needed and was simply learning a breathing exercise. No alternative signposting or support was given and that was it, when I said no to seeing the counsellor again the school stopped caring.
This lack of understanding was also so prevalent in my peers. One child’s parents wrote a letter to the school stating that I was a “danger and distraction” to their student, which ultimately saw me kicked out of all my lessons. Yes my school wanted me to sit in a room on my own for five hours of the day learning out of textbooks. I was being declined my right to education all because of a mental illness. In addition to this, many people refused to even talk to me as a result of my illness. The first thing you hear at school if you have a mental illness is that you’re attention seeking. When a girl in my class was admitted to hospital due to suicidal thoughts, the first thing people said was that she was attention seeking. People that I was friends with stopped talking to me. This escalated bit by bit until they eventually refused to sit in the same classroom as me. Mental illness is enough of a struggle on its own without being treated like you don’t exist.
And because teachers have no idea about mental health, they can’t even begin to teach students about it. Mental health is not featured on the curriculum at all. Kids are never taught about crisis lines, they aren’t taught about how to access help if they are struggling, they aren’t even taught that you are allowed to have feelings. They aren’t taught how to save theirs and others lives. Suicide rates are scarily high. In the UK, suicide is the top cause of death in males aged 20-49 and yet it’s just swept under the rug. This is the change that Dr Alex George is fighting for. We need this to become part of the curriculum. We need to stop countless deaths that could be prevented from happening. I’ve seen my parents lose a child (not from suicide) and the fact that this pain could be prevented for other families makes me want to fight for change even harder.
By time I was 16 (in year 11), I was also diagnosed with anxiety. This was not helped by my schools obsession with grades. I had to resit entire mock papers after school because my grade C was not considered high enough. The school did not offer any help with my illness, even though I was struggling to even attend school. They were just focused on grades.
I wish I could say I was an anomaly in this but it happens to children across the country every single day. Nearly 1 in 5 young people with a mental health problem have dropped out of school due to stigma. 1 in 10 boys with a mental health problem have been excluded. I was just one of an ever growing statistic.
And this is the change we are fighting for. We want to improve this treatment of kids in secondary school. We want kids with mental illness to know that that’s okay and that they are supported throughout this journey. They are not to be forgotten about due to their illness. We are also fighting for a greater education of teachers, parents and students alike on mental health and mental illness. People need to know how to support each other, and to know that they can reach out for help. We need to stop the stigma and most importantly, help to stop people feeling like they need to take their own lives. And most of all we are fighting for change from the government. For any of this to work we need funding. Boris the big man in charge has thus far shown that he really couldn’t care less about mental illness. We need this to become embedded in our curriculum and we need the government to implement changes to help save and improve lives for many years to come.
In order to see how you can help with this change, make sure you check out Dr Alex George on social media as well as the charity Mind to see the work that we are doing with the Educating Mental Health inquiry.
We need action and we need it now
“there’s a change coming once and for all”
Zoe x
my life with mental illness 
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