Student's Mental Health Matters

 The Webinar  "Student Mental Health Matters" goes into discussing students and how their mental health can affect them in not only the classroom but also in the world. The webinar also, discusses the ways in which we can be more responsible as educators and how we can help take care of our students mentally and provide them with resources that they may need.

The first big and key takeaways are how common mental health issues are in the students that we are teaching. The webinar discusses that one in five children, ages three to seventeen, have a mental, emotional, or behavioral disability. There also, is the discussion of how students of color have suicide rates that are twice the amount as their white peers. This shows that students who struggle with their  mental health is something that is very common to have in the classroom.

But what can we as educators do? We can educate ourselves as educators and provide other educators with mental health first aid training. We can make sure schools have unified mental health teams featuring a school psychologist, school social worker, and the school's counseling staff to work alongside the teachers. We can work to educate ourselves, educate the families in the schools, and work to remove the negative stigma around one's mental health. We can also give students of all ages the frameworks and language to discuss their mental health in a safe environment.

What we should not do as educators: We should not be trying to diagnose our students with different mental health issues. We should not be generalizing students problems. We should not be comparing one students problems to another student and or another students problems.

Together by doing things and not doing others to better our students health we can see a more positive change and provide students with what they need in order to be successful in not only the classroom but also, in the future when they are out in the world.