Should Schools screen for Mental Illness?

[kvnchrist]

Do you guys think that much of the social problems that we face today could have been taken care of if children would have been screened for mental illness?

[Vagrant0]

A large degree of these things cannot be screened for effectively. As the whole ADD testing and screening situation has shown, doctors are more than happy to put a kid on drugs just because a test tells them to. Spoilers: Everyone is a little f*#@ed up to a greater or lesser degree. Some of it might be genetic, but a good portion of it is also environmental or conditioned. If you sit someone down and tell them that their behavior is because of some illness, they won't change that behavior and will just blame the illness. Schools including or excluding students based on this criteria would only create havoc with the already screwed up school system and put alot of unnecessary pressure onto parents toward just medicating their children instead of trying to correct behavior as it happens.

[HeyYou]

A large degree of these things cannot be screened for effectively. As the whole ADD testing and screening situation has shown, doctors are more than happy to put a kid on drugs just because a test tells them to. Spoilers: Everyone is a little f***ed up to a greater or lesser degree. Some of it might be genetic, but a good portion of it is also environmental or conditioned. If you sit someone down and tell them that their behavior is because of some illness, they won't change that behavior and will just blame the illness. Schools including or excluding students based on this criteria would only create havoc with the already screwed up school system and put a lot of unnecessary pressure onto parents toward just medicating their children instead of trying to correct behavior as it happens.

I wholeheartedly concur with this assessment. In addition, I don't have a lot of faith in the public school system today, so, I most certainly would NOT want them delving into mental health issues of their students....... Besides, isn't it the PARENTS responsibility to look out for the health of their kids? (Yeah, I know, not that they are doing a bang-up job of it.....)

[Beriallord]

Public schools and government need less control, not more.

 

Doctors, I don't always trust them. Keep in mind, they have an invested interest in maintaining 'patients'. They're going to recommend you for some sort of medication just to keep you coming back.

[oolongdao]

Public schools need their priorities straight, that would fix a lot of their problems. The biggest issue with public schools is colleges. The Biggest issue with colleges is close ties with private industry. For instance, sports, major league sports snatches colleges kids away to make millions before they either destroy their bodies or do something stupid like rape someone or get too many women pregnant, So the colleges have every reason to make money off of the student while they can by creating a similar system. Then on the lowest level you have high schools and their screwed up system, which is even worst. Say you're a school with a lot of money because it's near a upper middle class neighborhood but you keep losing at sports, well if your like the one in my city you gerrymander the lines and take in more poor students, seems strangely generous until you realize they then put in place a zero tolerance policy. this allows them to keep the better athletes (who usually come from poor neighborhoods), while getting rid of the riff raff.

The only problem with all of this is that schools that do this, like the one in my area then b&@*$ and moan how they don't have money but the sports teams can still do all the things they want to, while the school lacks the money to do even the most basic things.

Mental health in schools is down right impossible when something like the above is considered, and all together redundant. Why would the school have a psychologist on hand to diagnose children for free? think of how much it would cost them, think of how embarrassing it would be to the school system if your educational system constantly pumped out people with mental issues or legal habits for everyone to see. When i was younger i was diagnosed with ADHD (which was later proven to be wrong) and given adderall. I unknowingly would take my pill before school, the only issue is that i also liked to play doom and diggers before school and found myself sitting at the computer forgetting i even had class until 2pm. the school system didn't even recognize i didn't have ADHD until it came time for state mandated tests and me being a non white non mentally healthy student was worth 6 times the amount of a white mentally healthy student, so they wanted me there. At which point they discovered that i just have sociopathic tendencies, which outside of a utter hatred of laws and social mores i just don't see. the school was still more than happy to help my father and mother find place to get me my adderall fix (and i wasn't the only one they did this for) because it was seen as a study drug even back in the early 2000's. hell if i was still on the tab i could've cried all the way to the bank once i got to college.

 

But honestly my 2 years of dealing with the school mental health system taught me one thing, unless it can be solved with pills and the pills help you do better at math and science, the school would rather act like you don't exist and that is the best of all scenarios.

[dudutz18]

I doubt screening is any effective. I believe the biggest problem is how uneducated the masses are. By mental illness, I assume you are speaking of broadly ADHD, depression, anxiety, and OCD etc. Some issues can be screened, like ADHD (Attention Deficit - Hyperactivity Disorder). Some others are a lot harder to detect as they develop over time, like depression and anxiety in adolescence.

 

A lot of schools don't screen for issues, so even things like ADHD can go untreated. And then comes the treatment. I'm gonna use ADHD as an example. The first line of treatment is therapy like cognitive behavioural therapy. And then comes Adderall. The other option is to adjust the learning environment which is costly and may require extra training on the teachers' end. Note that there may be special schools for students with ADHD. To go with the first option, therapy, requires cooperation between the school and the parents involved. This isn't preferred due to budget, time, and effort restrictions. Second option, drug, isn't that good either. Adderall is an amphetamine that increases dopamine level. But wait! Dopamine affects different regions of the brain. There aren't a lot of studies done on the full side effects. So drugs may actually do more harm in the long term. And don't get me started on mixing medications. Yet if goes untreated these students can become more isolated, prone to bullying, and may also develop further mental health issues.

 

I hope I wasn't too far off topic. So now back to the question. I'm assuming that by screening you mean; evaluating student academic and health records at one point of time as well as giving some "survey". That's not enough (Or even effective) to detect much or some of the issues, which I already mentioned can be developing over time. Educating teachers and parents and encouraging them to cooperate, I believe is the key - as opposed to merely screening for issues. The responsibility doesn't fall on parents or teachers alone, as I hope I have highlighted clearly in the above example. I can go on and on about the stigma mental issues have, how different issues require different treatments (Genetic hereditary vs mainly environmental), but the first step to solving these is the same: education. Why? Because mental health is just as important as physical health. But hardly anyone knows the first-aid of mental health. And no, the first-aid should not be drugs, with the exception of extreme circumstances.

 

PS: There may also be the need to train doctors not to prescribe drugs like Adderall and Paroxetine (Antidepressant SSRI) as first-line treatment. Overall, a very complex problem to solve.

Edited March 22, 2016 by dudutz18

[vikkizero21]

Mental health covers a very large amount of conditions and not all problems extend from mental health (most violent crimes are committed by those who by medical terms are "normal") Also certain mental health conditions can be developed at any time and some do not show symptoms of mental health until later life. It would be expensive probably lead to misdiagnosis and cause those with mental health to feel isolated or singled out.

 

It would just be better to have a better support network for children and to teach children about mental health, being that a quarter of them will suffer with it at one point during their life. In the UK there are some radio adverts (not enough media attention but some) about mental health and not to shy away from it, most people with mental health become isolated because no one wants to talk about it, better to erase the stigma and then build on how to help people.

 

As a whole most people would help someone who had cut on their arm because they can see it and understand how to "fix" it, because mental health is not visible and harder to "fix" most people would rather ignore it because it is easier.

[Mirocu]

Generally I´d say no. This is a dangerous thing to do as anyone can be labeled with a mental disorder depending on the one examining them or simply by disagreeing with someone else´s views. Case in point; feministic values has of today labeled boys with normal rough-and-tumble behaviour as having a mental disorder which sometimes even includes medication to calm them down.

 

Let us take that again: today boys, who not that long ago were considered having normal behaviour, are now being medicated despite only acting out how they are supposed to due to society demonizing masculinity and wanting to feminize boys.

 

This is interesting because on one hand they do this to western boys growing up and on the other hand they welcome waves of violent immigrants who come from and value a society that really pushes women down.

 

Can anyone say "irony" and "hypocrisy"?

[HeyYou]

In the county in which I live, fully 30% of students are on some variety of add/adhd medication.... For a condition which supposedly affects only 5% of children...... :)

 

But, I live in the USA, where it seems, every problem can be solved by some pill or other......

[Harbringe]

In the county in which I live, fully 30% of students are on some variety of add/adhd medication.... For a condition which supposedly affects only 5% of children...... :smile:

 

But, I live in the USA, where it seems, every problem can be solved by some pill or other......

 

I am so against this sort of thing . In males the brain does not reach full development til 21 - 25 and in females 19 - 23 , there are exceptions to the rule (some earlier , some later) but this idea that your gonna chemically treat children at a time when their brains are at one of the most important times of development , simply because they dont pay attention or are overly rambunctious or whatever is nonsense . All children go through stages like that and the vast vast vast majority of them simply outgrow it and that happens because their brains are still developing.

 

When I was growing up the things that the pyschology/psychiatric fields are now labelling as disorders and medicating were consider just a normal part of growing up.