Tag: education and mental health

I am not sure what was worse: being abused growing up while my community documented—then ignored—my torment, or being attacked for going public with my story.

Some might wonder why I'm still stumbling in the desert when there are cars and jobs and museums downtown, but really, the turquoise dawn is in the canyons. The thing is, my people seem to need this nutrition, the rarified medicine of this particular cactus and that specific root that I haven't found anywhere else.

I’d thought this teaching job would be my chance to make positive changes in children’s lives. But most of the recommendations in students' IEPs were related not to reading, writing, and ’rithmetic but to behavior control and obedience to adults. And the school seemed to be working very hard to prove that the kids were disabled and to get them certified as such.

I care deeply about the mental and physical health of children, including my own son’s. I don’t want students to suffer in silence and shame. But I am very concerned about just how this topic will be taught in schools. Adults need to get honest about the harm our systems and institutions cause to students every day, often in the name of “help.”

From Pew: "Amid sharply rising rates of teen suicide and adolescent mental illness, two states have enacted laws that for the first time require...

In this piece for Medium, Karen Kilbane discusses the ways that contemporary psychological theories, diagnoses, and behavior modification programs are harming the mental health and emotional...

This week we interview psychology graduate and teacher David Mielke who has become increasingly concerned about the number of children in the education system that have a psychiatric diagnosis and are on psychiatric drugs.

In this piece for The Guardian, a schoolteacher explains how unrealistic expectations of students' academic performance as well as a strong emphasis on test scores have harmed students'...

Studies of modern Native Americans have shown that “historical trauma,” the name that social workers give to the perception of historical loss passed down through...

“This is an article about how our education system is ruining young people’s lives. Nobody is listening to the teachers who say it, so perhaps someone will listen to me,” sixteen-year-old Orli writes in the Guardian. “Nothing is so important that it’s worth risking your health over, not even the piece of paper you get, age 16, to tell you whether or not you’re good enough.”