Why We’re Worried About Mental Health Classes in School
By: Counselors For Justice
Tags: Mental Health, Politics, Equality, Safety, Education

For once, the public is really proud of Florida. The state made national news in July when the Board of Education mandated mental health classes for public school students. The state now requires schools to provide 35 hours of mental health education starting in 6th grade.

Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, claimed that the required classes would “reinvent school-based mental-health awareness in Florida.” The Florida Counseling Association announced the mandate to positive reactions from members, calling it a “win for Florida.” And the Republican-led government of the battleground state is beaming.

However, the project’s implementation raises serious questions from advocates, students, and concerned parents. Increases in funding for community mental health services and public schools are easy proposals to support. But, we must also be wary when they place power in hands with insufficient resources or accountability.

What Could Go Wrong?

In July of this year, it was reported that the nation is facing a school counselor crisis. A dismal amount of students, especially students of color, attend schools with enough counselors and the ones who do are rarely able to access services. Counselors are drowning in overwhelming caseloads and administrative work while students face the consequences.

[enter 35-hour mandate stage right]

Officials have stated that funding for the classes would come from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ $75 million in increased mental health funds for schools, which the Florida Policy Institute has already asserted would do little to increase access to services. Florida already ranks 43rd in accessibility of care across the nation and an extra $75 million isn’t enough to free counselors from non-clinical, administrative duties or significantly reduce the student/counselor ratio.

Further, it is unclear how these strapped school districts would allocate time from existing curriculum since the state Dept. of Education did not provide further comment. There is no established curriculum to follow, which the Board stated would allow “autonomy” for school districts. However, similar mandates in the U.S. show that this risks reproducing disparities already present among school districts.

For instance, New York implemented similar mental health classes in July 2018 with choice of curriculum written into its mandate. The New York State Regent for Western New York stated that the ambiguity allowed communities to focus on issues that affected them most, like suicide or substance use. But some activists disagree. Peer advocates from Mental Health Advocates of Western New York said that, though the program was a step in the right direction, there was still a wide disparity of quality and support from district to district.

With such little direction for implementation and program evaluation, mandatory classes raise concerns about who will be teaching these courses and how effective they will be.

Beyond Practicality

Underlying the practical issues of funding and resource distribution for mandatory mental health classes are purposes and assumptions that raise concerns about the role of schools in mental health at all.

Florida’s First Lady, Casey DeSantis, who spearheaded the push for mental health classes in schools, said that “prevention is critical in dealing with [mental health] issues” and hoped the mandate would ensure that those in need receive “meaningful help and positive outcomes through effective treatment.” Another school board member, appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott claimed that the classes would “obviously” help people with thoughts of suicide.

And yet, Florida lawmakers continue to publicly fund private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students despite these students being more likely to die by suicide or be diagnosed with a mental illness than their straight and/or cisgender peers. Though the CDC has affirmed that inclusive and safe school environments are key preventative measures for reducing LGBTQ+ youth suicide risk, Casey DeSantis didn’t include these protections in her push for “prevention.”

Florida is also 1 of 14 states that haven’t opted to expand Medicaid as of 2019. The Florida Policy Institute estimates that expanding Medicaid would give coverage to over 730,000 Floridians, making their children far more likely to receive preventative care. The same report shows that expansion would also save the state nearly $500 million and the GOP-led government still hasn’t taken the money. Given these previous decisions by state lawmakers, at what point do these current efforts for “prevention” begin to seem insincere?

Ultimately, it is hard to believe that these required courses are part of a good-faith effort to increase community health resources. When the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act was signed, which allocated an additional $69 million to mental health services after the Parkland shooting, former Gov. Rick Scott was desperate to appease disgruntled constituents before the midterm election. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, an NRA favorite, also recommended increasing the number of employed school counselors in response to a shooting in 2018. Both states had infamous records regarding mental health legislation with Florida ranking 50th in per-capita funding and Texas not requiring counselors in schools at all.

And this mandate, commissioned by a former Republican Speaker of the House, falls only one week after the President and fellow Republicans blamed mental illness for mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Though billed as efforts to increase mental health awareness, the consistent timing of sudden care about mental health services makes one question the true intentions and purposes of the courses being implemented.

Are these classes genuinely aiming to increase mental health awareness? Or to distract from gun control and shift the responsibility of keeping people safe onto our youth? To form students into our instruments of surveillance on their peers who walk the halls with them?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, teaching and expecting students to spot symptoms of mental illness can risk further stigmatizing disabled and neurodivergent people and disproportionately affect students of color and LGBTQ+ students. Previous versions of the DSM are still being used to dismiss transgender people’s existence and research shows that mental health counseling is particularly vulnerable to bias and harm toward marginalized communities. Sharing these tools and assigning these responsibilities to students, without addressing the underlying bias in modern psychiatry, reproduces these problems in school environments.

To truly impact the physical and emotional wellbeing of students and our youth, we must go beyond insincere mandates and reactionary measures. We call on Florida and other states across the nation to be bold in their efforts to keep children and the rest of our communities safe. Until we can take on the responsibility of combatting white supremacy, misogyny, and systems of power in our schools and outside of them, mental health classes won’t rid us of stigma but entrench it.