Where is your mind?

(Warning: This may be an emotionally filled rant, with no real answers)

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”

this all started today with a simple question from a 13 year old boy. why do more boys kill themselves than girls?

To which my immediate response was.
wow.
um.
wow.

He simply heard it on the news and just wanted to know why.
After this discussion and a look at the most recent saddening statistics of how NZ has just hit the highest suicide rate since it started counting, i started to think about the impact this has on education.

And i’m not necessarily getting into the big things like suicide. When i say mental well-being im not just talking about the complex issues of mental health and mental illnesses but the every day life skills that help us cope with loss, change, stress and relationships. The skills that help us make healthy choices, that give us motivation to be the best version of ourselves, that give us the opportunity to help and connect with others.

Im going to acknowledge an embarrassing realisation which took me 20 years to figure out. Your mental well-being is just as important as nutrition and fitness.

and if you are my age, or older you may look at that and think well isn’t that obvious. but how obvious is it really?
what exactly is mental well-being? how exactly do i look after it?

During teaching college you learn a range of incredible ideas, you learn every aspect and key idea the curriculum covers, the complexity behind those ideas. Yet in reality you step into a classroom and see there is little time spent on these.

“Some things are just more important than others”,
“you will never succeed in life if you don’t have all these fundamental skills”

“There’s no time for that, that is the parents job”

Ask yourself, what is school for? To educate? to prepare you for the ‘real world’
If the point of education is to prepare our kids for the real world why is it that a topic that plays apart in our daily lives is given so little time. Providing students with opportunities to explore their mental well-being should not be something that is done once a year for a few week. It should be something we openly talk about. everyday. it should be teaching and modelling skills and it most defiantly cant be something that is just ‘the parents job’  what if the parent does not have the skills themselves to model to the students.

“Kids don’t have big problems to deal with”

There are two parts to this statement. firstly to a child something we see as minor can be the end of the world, and we need to acknowledge that to them that is their reality, no matter how much we see it as ‘stupid’ or ‘pathetic’ that child is still going to feel the way they feel in that moment.

Secondly if a student has healthy coping mechanism before a situation, when it arises they will be better equipped to deal with it.

So tell me again why “gender stereotypes are not as big a deal for males” when male youth suicide rate’s are significantly higher than any other.

tell me again how “students are to young to have issues” when young girls make up the greatest population of admission for self harm.

and tell me again why “there are simply more important things to teach” when the essence of succeeding and being happy its balanced, so fragile, on our ability to look after our mind.