Mental health matters

Time of India

2 days ago

Piali Banerjee teaches English in the International Baccalaureate programme at a private high school in Mumbai. She has authored three books for children, all of which take an innovative and personal look at history. She has also had a stint in journalism at The Times of India and Mumbai Mirror, where she focussed on writing features that looked at people and issues with empathy and humour. At present she is having a great time trying to instil a love for learning and literature among teenagers. Although she is a teacher by profession, she firmly believes that she is a student at heart. LESS ... MORE
We all remember those Physical Training (or Painful Training, as we fondly called our PT classes) in school. All those laps around the ground, while still trying to keep the lungs functioning; those bends and twists and stretches that got our collective knickers in a twist. Oh yes, our schools sure know how to keep their students physically fit and healthy.
It's just that most often our system falters when it comes to keeping students mentally fit and healthy.
And that is probably needed more urgently. Most students find their own rhythm to keep physically fit as they grow up, badgered in varying degrees by mothers, peers, society aunties (functioning in a society where 'fat' is a politically incorrect word) and that slinky anonymous body called social media. But, to deal with all of the above, students need to be mentally fit too.
Yes, students do talk of 'mean' teachers, but very few discuss their 'cruel' peers at the dining table. And I am deliberately differentiating 'meanness' from 'cruelty'. As a teacher, one has seen this cruelty up close and personal.
One has seen a youngster's backpack being held up for inspection in a class full of students by a sneering peer, with the words, 'Hey, does anyone want to see what a fake Adidas bag looks like?'
I call them 'words', but they are actually shrapnel that leave the target shredded and bleeding. Yet these wounds are never discussed at the dining table. These wounds are not seen by parents or teachers or school counsellors. These wounds are dealt with alone, processed through lonely tears.
One has seen students being mocked at for acne, so much so that those being mocked pretend to sleep in class, so that they don't have to sit up and present their flawed face to their peers. One has seen students being trolled on social media by an entire batch, for their skin colour or their unwaxed legs or for reading Dostoevsky. (The last one is not a made-up scenario, one has seen it happen.)
But these students don't breathe a word of this either to their parents or to the school counsellor. In fact, most kids do not want to be seen entering that socially branded door of a counsellor. They try to cope by isolating themselves.
Some kids cope by turning on their peers, often violently. In which case the school ends up having to punish the victim of mockery, rather than the mockers. In rare, very rare, cases, has one seen a child systematically neutralise their tormentors through words and body language alone. It has been done, with the said victim topping every class; discussing every writer, (Dostoevsky or otherwise) that she wished to, with her teachers; and stretching out her unwaxed legs with a defiant smile. But this salvo must have taken extraordinary effort and courage – which the rest of us mortals often cannot muster up. So where is the average kid to go? More important, to whom can the average kid go?
Since lecturing has never worked with teenagers, practical workshops are, perhaps, a way forward. These workshops can be conducted by teachers or guest experts. Empathy games, or even just a social circle time where pertinent questions are discussed, may help to at least open up those Pandora's boxes which are otherwise kept tightly sealed. Questions like: How does social media affect our ability to feel empathy? Is there an experience where you wished someone actually understood how you felt? Or even the simplistic: What would you say to a classmate who was feeling sad? It's surprising how much baggage emerges in these sessions.
A school that I taught at once, came up with an idea to provide emotional support to its students. All teachers were allotted a dozen students, whose mental wellbeing was his or her responsibility – creating a warm bond with these students, checking in on them regularly, providing an empathetic ear, just letting them know that they had a solid support person at school. It was an experiment that worked very well in some groups, moderately well in others and failed to take off in some groups. Yet, it is an idea that is worth a try.
The point is to keep dialogue always open. The point is to let kids know that they always have at least one person to go to, in times of emotional stress.
P.S: Any more ideas on how we can achieve this?
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Views expressed above are the author's own.