Youth Suicide, Self Harm, Addiction, Depression: How Culpable Are Educators and Psychologists?
Our small town experienced a teen suicide. It devastated us. The young high school student was darling and dear, well loved and cared for, and being educated in one of the best public school systems in the state.
School and community psychologists, yoga teachers, and religious leaders, with the best of intentions, spread their contact information like confetti.
But teachers and school staff do the lion’s share of heavy lifting in these matters and in all matters when you get right down to it. Educators profoundly impact the mental health of our children in both good times and bad due to the sheer number of structured hours they spend with them.
There is no way we educators can escape sharing the blame for this tragic event. But how can we, as educators, specifically identify, account for, and shoulder this blame? Exactly how might we be culpable?
We can only begin to answer these questions if we are willing to admit there might be something seriously amiss with our understanding and treatment of mental health, not just in our community, but in all communities, because 1 in 5 individuals per year, according to NAMI, suffer a mental illness, often with tragic consequences. If we want to make things better for the children under our watch, we must problem solve in new ways. We are clearly not getting things right when it comes to mental health.
I believe it is time educators take a closer look at the psychological theories of personality, emotion, behavior, and child development we’ve inherited and are expected to apply in our classrooms.
I have spend the past 4 years doing just that. And my research and analysis of our theories shows me most of the psychological theories underlying our educational practices have inexplicable inconsistencies, contradictions, and 100% of them lack scientific verification. (Many psychological studies are done in compliance with the scientific method, but the theories underlying the studies were not derived using the scientific method.)
What if the application of these questionable psychological theories are causing us to confuse, threaten, and harm the developing brains and nervous systems of our children and teens? Robert Sapolsky, neurobiology professor at Stanford, says Depression will be the #2 cause of disability in the near future. There is no way we educators do not play a part in this staggering fact. Clearly, we must be barking down a few very wrong trees.
Bad parenting, society, too much screen time, isolation, bullying, the decline of religion, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise are a few of the regular scapegoats educators and psychologists are quick to mention when deflecting blame for epidemic levels of mental illness in our culture. But what if these alleged causes of mental suffering have been misdirecting our efforts while allowing the true culprits to walk around scot-free wreaking havoc on our kids? What if the sweeping generalizations above have far less to do with our children’s mental suffering than the psychological theories we are basing our teaching practices on?
I’ve been a teacher and/or parent in over 20 schools in 3 different states, 8 different cities. I’ve never run across an educator lacking in good intentions. But this is part of the problem. We educators have been taught to value our personal intentions way too much because our psychological theories are written from the point of view of the authority in charge of the child, not from point of view of the child. Psychologists write theories in which the educational authority, regardless of how skilled or unskilled, regardless of personal thinking style, is obligated to make psychological determinations of his or her students. The educator has all the power in this equation, the child none. In addition, the theories are so open ended, there are as many ways to interpret them as there are educators. Thus, students have no idea how to predict how they’ll be evaluated and treated from teacher to teacher, year to year. This is confusing for all children and paralyzingly confusing to some.
It never occurred to me to question our psychological theories until one day I had an aha moment while watching my student problem solve. This student had been in my adapted physical education program for 6 years and had been described to me by SPED teachers as a boy who displayed ‘challenging,’ ‘oppositional’ and ‘defiant’ behaviors.
One beautiful May afternoon while playing kickball outside, I watched this student identify a problem, consider his options, then take actions to solve it. In solving his problem, he broke several rules, but he helped me solve personal and professional problems I had been struggling with for decades.
If I had analyzed this student’s behaviors throughout his problem solving process from start to finish for how his behaviors would compare with expected behaviors, I would have come up with words like challenging, oppositional, and defiant. But my ‘aha’ was I should not be analyzing this boy with such a comparison. I should be analyzing him in a much broader manner by considering how he is ABLE to integrate his cognitive, perceptual, sensory, physical, and emotional capacities when he interacts with both internal and external information.
This student helped me realize our psychological theories for how to understand human behaviors, perceptions, sensory capacities, and emotions in isolation, separated from one’s capacity to order and comprehend information, and separate from the specific attributes of one’s cognitive and physical capacities, have caused us to understand ourselves, others, and our relationships to others in distorted and damaging ways.
This student helped me realize we educators are indeed complicit in the fact 1 in 5 individuals develop a mental illness each year. This student motivated me to review and re-evaluate the psychological theories I’d been taught to base my teaching practices on with a critical eye, something I had never done previously. When I did look for logical inconsistencies and possible inaccuracies I found them everywhere. Never have I been so intellectually drop-kicked. I couldn’t believe I had not seen the holes in our psychological theories from the get-go.
My research led me to make so many connections about what psychological theories are getting wrong about optimizing brain development I decided to take a leave from teaching to research and write a book on this topic. After several years of research I approached a neuroscientist. He agreed with the connections I’ve made. We are now collaborating and hope to publish a book within two years about how to educate children to optimize healthy brain development and facilitate lifelong mental health.
After my original aha moment, my personal and professional life took a 360 degree turn for the better simply because, first of all, I understood how an individual’s comprehension, not his behaviors, is the basis for all his decisions and resulting actions. Behaviors exist to support comprehension, period. Thus a child’s behaviors are customized to complement his abilities to interact with and comprehend information. Thus a child’s behaviors will be as unique to him as his fingerprint. Looking for expected or unexpected behaviors in our children as we are taught in our psychology courses, is like looking for expected heights in our children. If we treated height as we do behavior, we would punish all children who come to school each day with unexpected heights. This means the shorter and taller than average children would be punished daily until they magically meet expected heights.
I really believe this analogy can help illustrate how painful and frustrating behavioral modification is for all of our students, especially those on behavior plans because a child’s behaviors cannot magically meet normed expectations any more than his height can. So setting our classroom and psychological expectations for children in terms of their behaviors is a recipe for driving them into unmanageable amounts of confusion and anxiety which is in turn a recipe for mental illness. Behavior is always in alignment with one’s comprehension as inevitably as height is always in alignment with bone growth. Realizing this made me realize working on a child to change his behaviors is something we should reserve for dystopian movies.
We should be working with our children purely at the level of their comprehension. Their behaviors will automatically change as their comprehension changes. Furthermore, a hypothesis I am working to prove, is that referencing a child’s behaviors is extremely threatening and violating to the child. The brain is as protective of its behaviors as it is all its capacities. And the brain doesn’t mess around. It protects all its capacities with a life or death ferocity. When we tell a child he can or cannot behave a certain way, it is no different than telling him he can only see or hear a certain way. Modifying behaviors is akin to modifying eyesight by placing an eye patch on a child or modifying movement by disabling a child’s hands or legs. It makes no biological sense. And it sets a child up for overwhelming paranoia. anxiety, and frustration.
Any capacity we take away from a human, or threaten to take away, whether eyesight, hearing, balance, muscle strength, taste, the ability to sleep, or behavioral generation, we put that human in a vulnerable and weak position because we limit that human’s ability to optimally interact with information in the ways he is ABLE to. We have arbitrarily decided behaviors are something we can isolate out and put under the jurisdiction of an authority rather than the child himself. We will eventually be horrified by this practice as it is such a violation of a child’s human rights, privacy, personal dignity, and his ability to optimally manage his own brain and body. Not to mention, I believe micromanaging a child’s behaviors is one of the main causes of overwhelming anxiety, aggression, depression, and eventually mental illness.
When the brain is in a vulnerable position, it has no choice but to cue for fight or flight. Neither positive thoughts, meditation, or grit can cause a brain to not cue for high anxiety when it perceives vulnerability. We cannot magically tell the brain to stop doing what it does any more than we can ask other organs to stop doing what they do. We simply cannot expect a threatened brain to stop cueing for the fight or flight response and instead take its marching orders from a psychology textbook or an inspirational quote book. But we do. We don’t ask other organs to conform to an ideological viewpoint, but we do this to the brain all the time. We treat the brain as if it is the arm of an ideology, not an organ inside the body.
To make matters worse, psychological theories are written as if all humans, in practice, are working with the exact same brain. Plus, psychologists treat each brain as if its operating manual can be found in a psychology textbook instead of inside the individual to whom it belongs. As a result, we have developed heartbreaking kinds of expectations of our children, expectations they can never fully meet, and thus believe themselves to be inferior human beings.
Children who see themselves as inferior or vulnerable walk around in a state of high anxiety. A brain will always cue for fight or flight whenever it perceives inferiority and vulnerability it cannot compensate for because the brain perceives such vulnerability in a life or death sort of weakness. This means children who are constantly having their behaviors scrutinized, commented upon, and modified have the same internal landscapes as soldiers placed on front lines without weapons. This is because behavioral commentary and modification strip a brain from using its tools in the ways it is able to.
Imagine the classroom as a battlefield. We put our student soldiers on the field, give them instructions, tell them to begin. Only we tell some soldiers they have a psychological disorder because of how they behave. Those child soldiers see themselves as unfit for battle. They have been told they cannot fight as well as the rest of the soldiers when they meet the enemy so they become crazed with paranoia, fear, and anxiety. These child soldiers are basically told they are going to die. Their anxiety goes through the roof and they either hide under a desk or go berserk. Every year teaching I have seen children take cover under desks and go berserk. I have also seen children quietly endure their paranoia and fear until it eventually manifest in much more destructive ways.
Comparing students to soldiers might seem an extreme analogy, but because much of the brain’s function is to fight for its survival in a life or death sort of manner, this analogy is spot on. The brain is hyper-vigilant for even the slightest things that could make it vulnerable. We educators must stop practices that put our student brains in overly vulnerable, weakened positions within the classroom setting. We should see our job as helping a student to mobilize his capacities to the best of his ability, not to mobilize his capacities so they operate in expected and normal ways according to some psychology textbook written by Victorian era men who never even interacted with children outside a clinical setting.
If we replace our scientifically unverified, intellectually sloppy, authority and disorder based psychological theories of child and human development with theories that see the brain as a one-of-a-kind information management system, we can help each child optimize his brain development and mental health.
The first distinction we can make is to understand every human is making sense of information in the ways that make sense to him and that human ‘sense-making’ is slightly to vastly different for every single human. The first practice we can stop is making comparison based evaluations of children in order to diagnose them with psychological disorders, deficits, or conditions based on how they measure up to what psychologists have identified as normally developing children. This practice is setting our children up to feel threatened, anxious, inferior, and unequal to the task of being human.
What causes each human to sense, comprehend, predict with, and then manage information in utterly unique ways from one another?
Well, consider a few of our human attributes like height, weight, strength, stamina, agility, coordination, balance, depth perception, visual acuity, aural acuity, sensory perception capacities, sensory sensitivities or insensitivities, handedness, gender, age, I.Q., eye-hand coordination, motor planning capacities, degree of muscle tone, verbal capacities, numerical, spatial, and directional capacities, experiential background, information processing speed, and long and short term memory capacities. These attributes integrate differently in every human. In addition, every single thought a human has entails exchanges among billions upon billions of neurons per second.
There is no way for one human to replicate the thinking patterns of another human. This would mean all the above attributes would have to be identical and each thought would have to follow the same exact billion plus neuronal exchanges. Yet somehow our psychological theories are written as if every human has the exact same brain. These theories are crying out loudly in a hundred different ways to be re-evaluated. Many of the cries are coming from the mental anguish of our children adversely impacted by them.
We need theories of child development that recognize each child thinks, senses, perceives, comprehends, predicts, emotes, and behaves in utterly customized ways according to his mental, physical, and sensory attributes and how those attributes integrate.
For example, I am 5 foot 1 inch, farsighted, have excellent verbal skills, and weak spatial and directional skills. I am strong and quick but organize and process information slowly. These are among the attributes that customize within me to dictate how I am able to sense, order, and comprehend information. These attributes also impact how I am able to manage and follow through with decisions I make. My husband has radically different physical and cognitive attributes than me.
In fact, let’s say my husband and I attended an event. You might interview us both after the event and not realize we were in the same place at the same time because we have such different relationships with information from one another. Our psychological theories give only shallow and cursory consideration to profoundly impactful individual thinking differences. Setting up psychological theories to allow each teacher to be the arbiter of who is psychologically normal or abnormal in her student population is dystopian. Tasking each teacher with making each student conform to psychological ideals of what is normal is equally dystopian. We need to turn our theories around to enable teachers to facilitate individual learning styles instead of enabling teachers to modify behaviors to force children to comply with the teachers’ learning styles. I believe supplying appropriate theory will also turn around the inappropriate amount of drugging we are doing to our children. A small percentage of children can benefit from drugs, but prescriptions are currently out of control.
Furthermore, I personally can only think and comprehend how I am able to. In other words, I cannot think how I am unable to think. Every moment of my human existence my behaviors will always be in compliance with how I am ordering, interpreting, and making sense of information. My behaviors support my comprehension, period. My behaviors don’t support anyone else’s comprehension. And the behaviors of other people don’t support my comprehension. Our behaviors are personal and private and should be allowed to stay that way.
In addition, humans do not make behavior choices. Neuroscientist, Jeff Hawkins, has shown us humans make predictions about what to do next based on how they are able to interact with information. Human behaviors have no agency in and of themselves, so defining children according to how they behave is like defining fish according to how they tie shoes. It makes no logical sense.
Measuring students up to standardized normed behaviors can help educators organize instruction, but that’s it. Standardized behavioral determinations cannot guide us for how to categorize the psychological, behavioral, or mental health of a child.
I could write a second essay and substitute the word emotion for behavior to make the same exact points for how private, personal, and customized emotions are to each individual child. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett came out with her book this year entitled, How Emotions are Made. This book demolishes much of what psychological theorists have written about emotions for the past hundred years. Our traditional psychological theories of emotion are not just wrong, they are very wrong.
In the meantime, we educators grasp at straws to solve relentless mental health problems plaguing our children to no avail. Lately, with high hopes, educators have become obsessed with emotional health. But again, thinking about emotions as separate attributes from comprehension gives us distorted and confusing ways to connect the dots between our individual emotions and what they mean for us.
I believe we need to tread lightly when and if we comment on a child’s behaviors and emotions because both are so personal, private, and customized. We treat a child’s behaviors and emotions the same way we used to treat his or her sexuality, as something under the jurisdiction of a specific moral or religious ideology instead of something under the jurisdiciton of the individual.
I believe we need to shift our efforts for how we teach behavioral and emotional health in the same ways we have shifted our efforts to teach reproductive health. We no longer persist in the archaic practice of telling students how they should manage their personal sexuality, we simply give them the most biologically accurate and up to date information so they can make informed decisions. We can similarly help our students achieve emotional health by informing them how emotions are made with the help of up to date scientific information like Feldman-Barrett has supplied and stop telling students how to interpret and manage their own personal emotions.
Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins’ has a book out entitled, On Intelligence. He believes the brain is an organ of memory and prediction and has ample research to back up his theory. Hawkins’ work supports my ideas for moving away from behavior management and moving towards comprehension facilitation, whatever this needs to look like for each kind of thinker.
Robert Sapolsky, lauded Stanford neurobiology professor has said, “Impediments to scientific progress quite often lie in what we know, not what we don’t know.” I cannot think of another scientific area of inquiry this statement applies to more than the area of mental health. I believe what we think we know via psychological theorists about child and brain development has been misdirecting our efforts and blocking our progress.
None of my ideas have yet been peer-reviewed or scientifically verified, so I cannot pass them off as facts. But I believe the ideas can serve as a catalyst for educators to start questioning the psychological definitions, concepts, and theories we have been accepting on faith as accurate. I believe the mental health of our children depends upon it.
My ultimate goal is to develop a theory for optimizing brain development educators can apply in ways to make their jobs easier and more rewarding and their students significantly mentally healthier.
My goal is to develop a theory where two radically different teachers, with radically different thinking styles and radically different political, moral, and religious beliefs can apply the theory in similar ways despite their differences. Imagine Donald Trump as your child’s teacher in 3rd grade and Barack Obama as your child’s teacher in 4th grade. We need a theory both men could apply similarly despite how differently they think and believe.
A theory for optimizing brain development must be ideology proof because our job in the public school system isn’t for each teacher to download his or her personal philosophy or ideology about how to live. It is about helping children achieve their learning goals, period. Educating a child isn’t about helping a child fulfill our goals and expectations for him; it is about helping each child develop his skills and talents in ways that make sense to him.
Character education is a whole other can of worms for another day, but we have no business shaping our children’s characters into what our personalized visions for what a character should be. Plus, the human brain/body has nothing in it called a character. The brain doesn’t manifest in the ether as a character. ‘Character’ is one of many false constructs perpetuated by false psychological theories that keeps our children confused and mostly feeling inferior because they can never measure up to something dangled in front of them when that something doesn’t even exist in the first place.
In my experience, applying these ideas does not lead to a free for all kind of classroom with kids behaving however they want. Classrooms can still have rules. But rules are understood as context specific boundaries discussed and validated by the whole class. Breaking a rule means the teacher reviews the rule in a way the student can re-order how he comprehends it.
In my experience applying these ideas leads to calmer kids who can settle into learning much more easily and contentedly because their brains are not constantly put into states of feeling inferior, threatened, or overly confused. When you don’t see behaviors as problems to fix, you stop having behavior problems in the classroom! Instead you have happy, relaxed students who can work through conflicts much more easily than when they are constantly scrutinized for their behavioral compliance.
Classroom management becomes easier with all students instead of easy with some students and a year long battle with others. If we assume all students are making sense of the rules in the ways they are able to, then when they break a rule we don’t become irritated with their ‘deliberate defiance’ of us. We brainstorm to figure out how we can explain the rules differently. Maybe a rule breaker needs to practice the rule with role play or simulated situations. Or maybe the rule needs to be modified.
If we don’t jump to behavior modification, students stay calm, we stay calm, and many more ideas are generated and explored for how to get from point A to point B. Behavior modification is easy, and it can work sometimes to get students to do one’s bidding, but my ideas explore why behavior modification wreaks havoc on student nervous systems and mental health. A great education is meaningless if it comes at the expense of an individual’s mental health.
