The Demand of primary and lower secondary schools towards Youth Mental Health Services (TSMREE): A research-interventation to support teachers to reflect on relational problems with students and parents

Abstract

In recent years, child and adolescent mental health services - such as the TSMREE where the authors work - have seen a significant increase in access for minors with school integration problems. The increase of difficult educational relationships is encouraging schools to suggest psychiatric evaluations for students and to request the activation of mental health interventions. There are growing concerns about the risk of medicalizing issues that were previously viewed as part of normal life and normal differences among students (Frances, 2013), as well as the "colonization of the school by the health paradigm" (Goussot, 2015), which leads teachers to not deal with the relational and contextual significance of children’s difficulties. The objective of the article is to suggest the implementation of interventions aimed to promote the development of teachers' skills to address emotional and relational dynamics in their work. To this end, the authors conducted a research-intervention project involving three Comprehensive Institutes in Rome. They analyzed the demands placed on mental health services and the problems that teachers currently face in their relationships with students and families, which push them to request health interventions more frequently. The research - based on the methodology of Emotional Text Analysis (Carli & Paniccia, 2002) -highlighted how teachers feel challenged by students who are perceived to be changed compared to the past, becoming less compliant with the expected behaviors. In response to this critical situation, teachers balance between two emotional positions: to take their own responsibility to reflect about how adapting their work to this change; or "throwing up their hands" in the fantasy of delegating the intervention on "problematic" students to the specialists.In this context, the research underlines the risk of a "resignation of pedagogical responsibility" of the teachers (Goussot, 2015), in the so defined "diagnostic collusion" between schools and health services. This collusion leads to attribute problems exclusively to individual disorders of the student, not considering the contextual and relational significance of them, and so underestimating the influence of the environment. On the other hand, the necessity of addressing the challenges of coexistence among teachers, students, and families is known. Mental health services are called to take an intermediary role in the relationship between students, families and teachers, helping to suspend conflicts and to create spaces for discussion and reflection, which are useful for understanding the emotional challenges characterizing school experience.