Forty-three percent of LZHS students feel uneducated about at least one mental health issue. Health classes must improve so students can learn.

Everyone has a brain, so learning about possible issues is important. Yet over forty percent of students do not understand these problems. LZHS needs to do more to teach students about mental health.

Mental illnesses can affect anyone, no matter what background or family life. Mental illness has a bad reputation, and learning about mental health is a good way to eliminate the many misconceptions. Alongside discussions of mental illness needs to be conversations about general mental health and good coping strategies to minimize student risk.

High school is a time when students experience large amounts of stress in and out of school. Mental health issues can develop from untreated stressors, so it is important for the school to educate and inform students of what to watch out for. The school can help by teaching students how to avoid developing an illness or unhealthy coping habits.
“Approximately 20 percent of youth ages 13 to 18 experience severe mental disorders in a given year,” according to the National Association of Mental Illness, or NAMI. “For [youth] ages 8 to 15, the estimate is 13 percent.”

The Illinois State Board of Education has health education standards, but they are vague at best. In the section titled “Health Promotion, Prevention and Treatment,” nothing directly references mental health in the list of things that should be covered during high school. Moreover, the standards are not always being met. Some students do not remember learning about how to prevent mental illness or recent advances in treatment of mental illness.

Currently, health classes spend about one to two weeks on mental illness, focusing too heavily on depression and anxiety. Bear Facts attempted to verify the actual requirements but was unable to attain the curriculum. During these classes, the definitions for some illnesses can become unclear or mixed up, leaving students even more confused than before.

The mental health education high schoolers receive is no better than that of middle schools, according to Bear Facts experience. Students receive brief overviews of each illness, but nothing more advanced than what they already knew. It is important and should be expected that students receive more in depth education in high school.

A possibility is having mental health professionals teach the proper definitions. Health teachers cannot be comfortable with every individual illness, and then spend less time teaching about those they are not comfortable with. There should also be more focus on some illnesses that are not as well known or understood, which is difficult with teachers’ discomfort.

Health classes are required for all students and thus make excellent avenues for teaching teens about the illnesses they may come in contact with or suffer from themselves. Psychology classes delve deeper into the brain, but Psychology is an elective, and all students need to understand mental illnesses.

Many people are not sure where to begin when it comes to mental illness. It is a topic that is often ignored since it is easier to pretend such problems do not exist than to try to contend with them. Society needs to move towards a more open dialogue about ways the brain can get sick, and the best way to do that is to start educating younger generations.