As Education Secretary John Swinney announces that every school should have a counsellor to help both pupils and teachers with their mental health, it’s worth asking whether this will make things worse rather than better.
The growth of what some call a therapeutic culture is one of the most remarkable transformations in society in the last generation. There is a place, of course, for counsellors and therapeutic practices but over the last 25 years “opening up” and receiving “expert” support has become almost unquestioned.
Part of the danger with this approach is that everyday difficulties faced by children growing up increasingly become part of a diagnostic problem, a quasi-medical form of intervention, with resulting medication or therapeutic guidance becoming a relative norm. Shy children become labelled as social phobic, fidgety kids have ADHD, anyone not quite on the ball is “on the spectrum”.
The result, in part, is that teachers feel less able to deal with difficult children – it’s a syndrome or a condition, so what can I do, I’m only a teacher.
In the 1960s, American thinkers were already starting to notice this development. Edgar Z Friedenberg, as early as 1959, identified the trend and cautioned against the growing practice of using therapeutic methods to resolve the anxieties of adolescents. For him the problem was less with the children than with a teaching profession that no longer knew or believed in the value of knowledge and ideas.
A more cynical, empty culture that lacked direction and meaning, he argued, was now adopting therapeutic techniques to avoid the difficulty of leadership and the ability to inspire. Without a dynamic belief in progress and a profound sense of the importance of education, teachers were left without the resources and energy to question, challenge and socialise young people.
In Scotland, £60 million has already been pledged to increase the number of school counsellors. No one seems to ask about the evidence of the success of these practices, nor about the potential for a counselling culture to make things worse. As with the man with the hammer who only sees nails, for therapeutic schools an increasing number of issues become mental health related.
The likely outcome with all of this is that the more counsellors we place in schools the more children will be diagnosed as having mental health problems. Likewise, if teachers are encouraged to use counsellors, it is likely that difficulties at work will be categorised as “stress” related, where stress itself is no longer seen as part of life and something we can generally deal with, but as an illness.
Sometimes it’s good to talk but sometimes it’s also worth talking about how the more we “talk” the more ill children we appear to create.
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