Teachers' Minds Matter

A huge amount of time, effort and expense is devoted in schools and in services around them to look after the mental health of children and adolescents, and rightly so. However I have noticed that we rarely consider the mental health of the teachers themselves, those entrusted with guiding, teaching and counselling the young people in whom we invest so much.

You may think that this is simply an issue of mental health at work and so any consideration of it should simply align with any other occupation. I suppose this is probably the case but over the coming months I want to provide a teacher-specific viewpoint because I do think there are some aspects of teaching and teachers that make this setting unique and also simply because I want to raise the issue of the emotional wellbeing of teachers.

Why does this matter so much? Whether because it simply should as we care for our colleagues or because we are cynical and only worried about the impact of staff absence, we cannot ignore that mental health conditions have an impact on school life and so should be actively considered.

Given an approximate teaching population of 450 000 I have taken the following data from the MIND website and worked out (on average) how many teachers may be suffering from one of the listed conditions:

 

Teaching has its own set of stressors which exacerbate underlying mental health conditions or as the catalyst for conditions such as depression. As colleagues, school leaders and parents we ought to be aware of these. Whatever your motivation I would ask you to visit this blog from time to time; I would like to raise awareness and provoke debate and in doing so hopefully help some of my friends and colleagues.