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More states are allowing children to take mental health days

October 5, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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More states are allowing children to take mental health days

By Andrea Atkins October 2, 2022 at 7:24 a.m. EDT Washington Post

With child mental health problems on the rise in the past few years, a growing number of states have adopted laws that let students take an excused absence if they feel anxious, depressed or need a day to “recharge.”

A dozen states already have measures in place that allow kids to take off for mental health and not just physical health reasons. A handful of others* are considering making similar changes to school absentee rules.

The move is a recognition of a disquieting trend: In December 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory declaring a mental health crisis for American children, citing “an alarming number” of young people struggling with “feelings of helplessness, depression, and thoughts of suicide.” Between March and October 2020, the height of the pandemic, the percentage of children visiting the emergency room for mental health issues rose 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11 and 31 percent for children ages 12 to 17, according to the Children’s Hospital Association.

In 2020, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the second leading cause of death among teens, a 31 percent rise over 2019

Christine M. Nicholson, a clinical child psychologist in Kirkland, Wash., who sees many children with mental health struggles, said she supports this effort to allow mental health days. She said kids sometimes need to skip school, go for a hike, see a movie or even stay home and bake a cake or watch a movie.

“I think mental health has to be appreciated as much as physical health,” she said. “Kids are having a tough time, and they need a break.”

“The pandemic, with its isolation, didn’t help,” said California state Sen. Anthony Portantino, a Democrat who introduced a bill that was signed into law in 2021. The bill does not specify how many days a year a child can take. Portantino, whose brother Michael took his own life in 2010 at age 52, said he hopes other families can avoid the tragedy his family suffered: “The pandemic exacerbated the need, but if it can hasten the fix, then that is something positive.”

New school mental health days? How parents can make them work for kids.

Proponents of such measures say they are long overdue and can help de-stigmatize mental health in the eyes of parents and children. So far, Washington, California, Illinois, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Kentucky provide mental health days.

“If nothing else, it makes a huge statement that mental health matters as much as physical health,” said Mike Winder, a Republican Utah state representative who sponsored a bill that became law in 2021. Winder introduced the bill after conversations with his daughter who suffered her own mental health issues. “This policy is communicating from the highest levels that it’s okay to take care of your mental health,” he said of the bill, which does not limit the number of days a child can take.

But how does taking a “mental health day,” which Americans traditionally have construed as a “winkwink, nudge-nudge” excuse for playing hooky, improve mental health?

“When students are feeling physically unwell, there is a universal understanding that they should stay home and they should take time to feel better,” said Barb Solish, director of Youth and Young Adult Initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which supports the use of mental health days.

“School policies that recognize mental health as an acceptable reason for absence can help students take the time they need to care for themselves and restore their health,” Solish said. “Practically speaking, if you have a fever, you’re not paying attention in class, right? You’re not learning the lesson. If you’re feeling overwhelming anxiety, you’re not learning either.”

In states that have adopted them, the policies vary, although in all cases, parents must sign a note excusing their child. Some place limits on the number of days off a child can claim — for instance, in Connecticut, students can have two days per year and they may not be consecutive — while others, such as California, do not.

As with all absences, missed schoolwork is expected to be made up. But the policies do not dictate how the days off may be used — whether for staying in bed or attending therapy appointments or something else. Some suggest that could engender abuse. Portantino bristles at the idea.

“We don’t question that a parent would like Johnny to stay home because he has a cold. That’s the exact reason we have to have this bill. That’s a stigma we have to correct. We’re not making a distinction between physical and mental health. If your child is sick, your child is sick,” he said.

Most of the laws passed or introduced require that a parent provide the same kind of excuse note that a physical illness would require.

Some worry that providing mental health days isn’t the right approach to this crisis.

In the National Review, Daniel Buck, editor in chief of Chalkboard Review, a newsletter focusing on education, wrote that school mental health days “could alleviate immediate distress but facilitate habits that only worsen anxiety and depression in the long run.” He suggested that they would teach kids avoidance rather than how to deal with the real issues that plague them, such as too much social media. “By popularizing mental-health days, we are encouraging our students to allow the world to dictate their emotions in place of teaching self-regulation and emotional control,” he writes.

Instead, he suggests, “What if we built resilience back into our schools? What if we trained students in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and habits of virtue in Aristotle such that they can face the inevitable difficulties of life? And these would include habits of emotional awareness such as regular reflection, discussions with loved ones, or planned, appropriately timed days of rest.”

Solish said there is a fine line between taking a day off to feel better or missing school to avoid a test you haven’t studied for. That’s why it’s important for parents to get to the bottom of why a child might ask for time off. And, she added, if a child is asking for or taking an abundance of these days off, that can be a signal something is wrong, and indicates a need for professional help.

Solish said, “We’re not going to solve the youth mental health crisis with a few mental health days. But it’s a great starting point.”

Why tween girls especially are struggling so much

Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York who studies mental health services in high-need school districts around the country, agreed.

Days off will help, he said, but “there are too few [mental health] providers, too few online resources, too few school counselors trying to serve too many students and far too little information given to educators about how to support kids.” Of the more than 100,000 clinical psychologists working in the United States, only 4,000 are child and adolescent clinicians, according to a 2022 report by the American Psychological Association. “School psychologists are also in short supply, leaving kids without enough support at school,” the report said.

Jack Ramirez, 19, of Spring Township, Pa., said he believes mental health days could literally be a lifesaver for many young people.

He had urged Pennsylvania state Sen. Judith Schwank (D) to introduce a mental health days bill in 2020, when he was an intern in her office the summer before his senior year of high school. He was still reeling, he said, from the suicide of a classmate a few months earlier. Maybe if that student had felt he could stay home to take care of his mental health, Ramirez thought at the time, he would still be alive.

The measure, which would provide two excused mental health days per semester, is still in committee in the Pennsylvania state Senate.

“This is not a bill to skip school,” said Ramirez, now a sophomore at Rutgers University in New Jersey who has dealt with his own feelings of isolation and anxiety. “High school students are feeling isolated, they feel the pressure of grades. They are competing against each other. It’s getting really scary, and we don’t pay enough attention. … If we want to start saving lives and start talking about solutions, pressing pause on a lot of these things we face is so important.”

Make the most of a ‘mental health’ day

Should you encourage your children to take an occasional step back from their miniature rat race? And if you do, is there a way to make the most of it?

“There’s no perfect way to take a mental health day,” said Barb Solish, director of Youth and Young Adult Initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “But it does help to be intentional.”

Here are some of Solish’s tips for reaping the most benefit from a “mental health day”:

Listen to your child: Ask open-ended questions about their relationships and experiences and about why they think they need a day off. Then let them talk.

Make it meaningful: Try to avoid catching up on school work or getting lost in social media. “Those are stressors for kids,” Solish said.

Pursue calming activities: Take a walk, bake, draw, get lost in nature. “Whatever brings your kid back to center is a good thing to do,” said Solish, adding that you don’t want to overschedule the day, because that will be stressful in its own way. Should parents allow kids to indulge in video games, television or other screen time? “Nothing is really off limits,” Solish said. “You just want to make sure you’re being really thoughtful about what is going to help.”

Ease up on the feelings talk: “You don’t have to push kids to talk about their feelings all day,” Solish said. You can talk about how important it is to take care of your mental health.

Know when you need more help: If your child is showing increased irritability, sleeplessness, a depressed mood, low motivation or is regularly asking to stay home from school, you may need help from a mental health professional, said Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist with the Child Mind Institute in New York. Contact a pediatrician, school counselor or your family doctor to find a recommendation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/02/student-mental-health-days/

Experts say schools could recover pandemic losses by 2028. What then?

October 4, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Doing better than before the pandemic would require more effort than we seem capable of giving

Perspective by Jay Mathews  Washington Post Oct 2nd 2022

When will the U.S. education system return to the learning levels of 2019? One headline summed up the problem this way: “Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out by Two Years of Pandemic.”

People who have been studying our schools for decades are cautious when answering my question. Some say reading and math averages could rebound by 2028, but they admit many children will never get everything they missed.

The experts have their own question: How willing are we to invest the effort and money needed to improve the learning of children whose families are at the bottom of the income scale? Giving students more time to learn and better-trained teachers appears to work. But many students didn’t have such help before the pandemic. How can we expect them to get it now?

Diane Ravitch is our best education historian and best-known writer about schools. She said: “My hunch is that the downward slide in test scores can be overcome, not quickly, but in less time than the time stolen by the pandemic. … My hope is that students will make up for lost time in a year or two if they have experienced teachers and stability — no school closures or disruptions.”

Perspective | Disadvantaged kids hurt by keeping pandemic’s relaxed teaching style

That’s a big if. Education policy guru Chester E. Finn Jr.’s latest book assesses the national tests we use to measure progress in learning. He, too, offers a mix of hope and fear about the future. “Based on what we know today, history suggests that gains equivalent to the pandemic losses could be seen in as little as four or six years after 2022, but the more common pace of change in both directions is glacial,” he said. “I worry especially about reading, which has seen the fewest gains over the long haul.”

Some experts are optimistic. “This year’s NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores should be the bottom in terms of pandemic effects,” said Tom Loveless, author and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Barring another pandemic or Great Recession, I expect NAEP scores to return to 2019 levels within two NAEP cycles, by 2026.”

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted that focusing on exam results ignores harm to children too young to be tested. “Not only do we have to consider the serious negative consequences of the pandemic and school closures on kids who were school-age during 2020-22, but also how the crisis impacted children ages 0 to 5,” he said. “There’s some evidence that many of those kids suffered developmental delays and missed out on high-quality child care and preschool experiences, meaning they will come into school further behind as well.”

Tying shoes, opening bottles: Pandemic kids lack basic life skills

Harvard University education expert Paul E. Peterson said the best studies of school closings in the past reveal lasting damage. In Austria and Switzerland, little touched by World War II except for the closing of schools, researchers found that “those who lost years of schooling never recovered, judging by earnings received in adulthood,” Peterson said.

Karin Chenoweth, author of the books “Schools That Succeed” and “Districts That Succeed,” mentioned an important fact left out of the debate: “The ironic part of all the doomsaying panic about how the pandemic erased two decades of progress is that hardly anyone noticed that we had made such progress while we were making it.”

Recovering from the catastrophe, she said, requires recognition that progress in the recent past came “in large part because for the first time, schools were expected to teach all children, not just some. Many educators took that charge seriously and really ramped up the amount children in their charge learned.” Will that happen now?

Some experts emphasized that huge gaps in the public education system existed before the pandemic hit. “In 2019, just 15 percent of Black eighth-graders were at or above reading proficiency,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive of the Success Academy charter schools in New York City. “Low-income children of color deserve better, much better. First, schools should stop lowering standards and dumbing down curriculum.”

Successful programs train teachers to encourage students and earn their trust, rather than just make demands. Thuan Nguyen, chief executive of the nation’s largest college preparatory program, Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), said that “we can collectively decide how long it will take to recover from the impact of the pandemic” by embracing the fact that “the best way … to accelerate learning is through relationships.” Nguyen said the bond between students and teachers is crucial: “There is nothing as powerful as having someone who believes in you and cares about you.”

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

Kinnari Patel-Smyth is acting chief executive and president of the KIPP Foundation, which oversees the nation’s largest charter school network. “Moving forward in this recovery means that federal and state politicians need to prioritize educational spending, at least for another decade,” she said. “It means we need to work harder to ensure every child is a strong reader. It means we need to address the trauma caused by this pandemic and the inequities in this country.”

There are many other suggestions for reform. Unfortunately we did not get very far with most of them before the pandemic. It is unlikely we will do better when our principal emphasis is just getting back to where we were.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/02/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery/

Student absenteeism skyrocketed in the pandemic as test scores plunged

October 4, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The rate of missing students appears to have doubled

By Donna St. George  Washington Post September 29th 2022

Chronic absenteeism in public schools surged during the pandemic, which experts say helps explain a historic plunge in student test scores.

At least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during 2020-2021, the first full academic year of the pandemic, according to federal data analyzed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit Attendance Works. That’s 25 percent more than the typical 8 million chronically absent students each year.

But early data from a handful of states during the pandemic’s second full school year shows that absenteeism may have dramatically worsened. Rates will probably double, compared with the pre-pandemic year, researchers said — an “alarming” increase. And that has clearly driven down test scores, they said.

“If kids are getting less instruction, or less-consistent instruction, you’re going to learn less and you’re going to be able to answer fewer questions on the tests,” said Robert Balfanz, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Everyone Graduates Center.

Already, four states — Connecticut, Ohio, Virginia and a subset of California — have posted figures for 2021-2022 that show the doubling that he and others predict. National data for that year has not yet been released, but researchers said data from school systems in other states showed similar spikes.

The soaring rate of chronic absenteeism converges with striking declines in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called “the nation’s report card.” Federal officials called the stark declines “historic” when they were released.

Test scores in elementary school math dropped seven points, marking a first-ever fall, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years. The results, made public Sept. 1, were the first nationally representative comparison of student achievement from just before the pandemic with that two years later. Students who took the test were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade.

How the pandemic is reshaping education

Students are considered chronically absent when they miss more than 10 percent of school days for any reason — unexcused or excused absences, or suspensions — which research links to serious consequences: They are less likely to read on grade level by third grade, and more likely to score lower on standardized tests and get suspended in middle school. They are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.

Researchers also created a state-by-state comparison, showing a wide range of chronic absenteeism. The highest rates, of more than 30 percent statewide, were reported in Kentucky, Arizona, Nevada, Rhode Island, Oregon and New Mexico.

Zeroing in on even one state is sobering, Balfanz said. In Kentucky, an extra 116,537 students were chronically absent in 2020-2021, compared with the pre-pandemic year of 2018-2019, with 118,795 students swelling to 235,332. “This is a lot of kids missing a month or more of school,” he said.

Cheryl Horn, a kindergarten teacher in Maryland, said she saw the problem in her classroom last school year. Three of her 12 students were repeatedly absent — making it harder for them to get to know the routine, build bonds with their peers and teacher, and stay up to date on learning. “When you miss one concept and the next concept is building on it, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle,” she said. “You’re always catching up.”

Many students with low NAEP scores reported more technology difficulties or other challenges during months of virtual and hybrid instruction during the pandemic. Lower-performing students as a group had less access to a computer all of the time, a quiet place to work some of the time, and daily or near-daily support from a teacher.

Those setbacks, in turn, also affected attendance, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, which worked with Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes, a senior research associate at the Johns Hopkins center. “If you don’t have a computer, you can’t show up,” she said. “If you don’t have internet, you can’t show up.”

Especially during the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has been extremely underreported, Chang said. States and school systems shifted definitions of student attendance in major ways — particularly when classes were held remotely. In 2020-2021, Connecticut required students to spend half the day in a range of learning activities to be counted as present, while Alaska considered remote learning like a correspondence course, so students did not have to log on.

Teachers around the country have also said that even if students signed on, it was hard to tell if they were really listening because so many turned off their computer cameras.

During the second full year of the pandemic, other problems had an effect. Many students were out at the beginning of the year and just after the holiday break because of covid surges and quarantines. Teacher and staff shortages also were rampant.

Chang urged school systems to closely monitor student attendance, and to intervene with students who miss more than two days a month. “They need extra outreach and support,” she said, to avoid experiencing the worst effects of missing school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/29/student-absenteeism-pandemic-attendance/

National survey: Students’ feelings about high school are mostly negative

October 4, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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A teen girl sleeping in class

By Brita Bellijanuary 30, 2020 in Yale News

Ask a high school student how he or she typically feels at school, and the answer you’ll likely hear is “tired,” closely followed by “stressed” and “bored.”

In a nationwide survey of 21,678 U.S. high school students, researchers from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the Yale Child Study Center found that nearly 75% of the students’ self-reported feelings related to school were negative.

The study, which appeared in the January edition of the Journal of Learning and Instruction, also involved a second, “experience sampling” study in which 472 high school students in Connecticut reported their feelings at distinct moments throughout the school day. These momentary assessments told the same story: High school students reported negative feelings 60% of the time.

“It was higher than we expected,” said co-author and research scientist Zorana Ivcevic.  “We know from talking to students that they are feeling tired, stressed, and bored, but were surprised by how overwhelming it was.”

Students were recruited for the survey through email lists of partner schools and through social media channels from nonprofits like the Greater Good Science Center and Born this Way Foundation. The students represent urban, suburban, and rural school districts across all 50 states and both public and private schools. The researchers found that all demographic groups reported mostly negative feelings about school, but girls were slightly more negative than boys.

“Overall,” said co-author Marc Brackett, “students see school as a place where they experience negative emotions.” 

In the first online survey, students were asked to “think about the range of positive and negative feelings you have in school” and provide answers in three open text boxes. They were also asked to rate on a scale of 0 (never) to 100 (always) how often they felt 10 emotions: happy, proud, cheerful, joyful, lively, sad, mad, miserable, afraid, scared, stressed and bored.

In the open-ended responses, the most common emotion students reported was tired (58%). The next most-reported emotions — all just under 50% — were stressed, bored, calm, and happy. The ratings scale supported the findings, with students reporting feeling stressed (79.83%) and bored (69.51%) the most.

When those feelings are examined with more granularity, said Ivcevic, they reveal something interesting. The most-cited positive descriptions — calm and happy — are vague.

“They are on the positive side of zero,” Ivcevic said, “but they are not energized or enthusiastic.” Feeling “interested” or “curious,” she noted, would reveal a high level of engagement that is predictive of deeper and more enduring learning.

She added that many of the negative feelings may be interrelated, with tiredness, for example, contributing to boredom or stress. “Boredom is in many ways similar to being tired,” she said. “It’s a feeling of being drained, low-energy. Physical states, such as being tired, can be at times misattributed as emotional states, such as boredom.”

The researchers noted that the way students feel at school has important implications in their performance and their overall health and well-being. “Students spend a lot of their waking time at school,” Ivcevic said. “Kids are at school to learn, and emotions have a substantial impact on their attention. If you’re bored, do you hear what’s being said around you?”

Public attention has turned recently to early start times for high schools in the U.S. and how that contributes to sleep deprivation among students, which is associated with a number of other health risks — including weight gain, depression, and drug use — and poor academic performance. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later, but the vast majority start earlier.

“It is possible that being tired is making school more taxing,” Ivcevic said, “so that it is more difficult for students to show curiosity and interest. It is like having an extra weight to carry.”

Unfortunately, she added, decisions about school start times are often not made with students’ health and wellbeing in mind. “There has been a movement in recent years to move school start times later,” she said. “The reasons for not moving it have nothing to do with students’ wellbeing or their ability to learn.” Instead, these decisions are often driven by concerns about athletic programs, extracurricular activities, and transportation.

At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where Brackett is founding director and lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning, the goal is to give students and staff the tools to use their emotions wisely. RULER doesn’t claim to prevent tiredness and boredom, but it is designed to help students to find an outlet for their feelings and to support teachers and students in developing emotion skills to promote greater engagement and enhance academic performance.

https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/30/national-survey-students-feelings-about-high-school-are-mostly-negative

Wes Moore wants Md. students to do a year of service after graduating

September 27, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Ovetta Wiggins  Washington Post Sep 24th 2022

Maryland gubernatorial hopeful Wes Moore (D) wants to create a new rite of passage to adulthood for high school graduates: a year of public service.

The idea of having young Americans spend a year providing service in their communities has been bandied about for more than a decade. National nonpartisan groups have formed around it. A presidential candidate once suggested it. But political will and the often hefty price tag associated with requiring participation have stalled national efforts.

And now Moore, an Army veteran and lead contender in the race to become Maryland’s next governor, is pushing a plan to offer tens of thousands of young Marylanders a chance to participate in a state initiative similar to national programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps and Teach for America.

The service year option, which would provide job training and mentorship, is designed to prepare young Marylanders for college and careers and to make access to those opportunities equitable and affordable; part of Moore’s broader platform to attack complex systemic problems, such as child poverty and the racial wealth gap, with a focus on providing the same opportunities to people from various backgrounds.

Project advocates say it would be the first program of its kind in the country. Maryland lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to launch Maryland Corps, a similar, and much smaller, program more than five years ago, but concerns were raised about the $2 million needed to implement it and the idea was shelved.

Maryland voters, tell us what you want to hear from candidates for governor.

Moore, who has not offered a cost estimate and has said he does not plan to raise taxes to fund it, said his program probably would run through a partnership of federal, state, and local governments, along with nonprofit and for-profit companies. An industry expert estimated that a service year option could cost as much as $30,000 per year for each participant, depending on how it is structured.

Moore sees it as an investment in the state’s economic and educational future.

“If you look at things like gap years, … the challenge of them is that not every kid can do it,” Moore said. “I’m a big believer in experiential learning. I feel like there’s a lot of students who are just finishing up and they’re not clear what they want to do. And so if you give them an opportunity to learn and grow … that’s going to help them through this transition to adulthood.”

Most of the calls for national service have followed major flash points in history, from the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to the 2016 presidential election, which caused political divisiveness.

The vitriol has led to an increase in hate crimes in Maryland and across the country. According to FBI data, hate crimes in Maryland skyrocketed 110.5 percent, from 19 in 2019 to 40 in 2020. The numbers jumped 13.4 percent nationwide.

Advocates say service brings people together from different races, cultures and economic statuses for common purpose.

John M. Bridgeland, co-founder and vice chairman of the Service Year Alliance, an initiative to create a national service counterpart to military service in the United States, described Moore, a best-selling author and former chief of one of the country’s largest poverty-fighting organizations, as being “uniquely positioned to advance this idea at a uniquely important moment in history.”

Bridgeland, who was appointed the first director of the USA Freedom Corps, a national community service program created after 9/11 by President George W. Bush, said much of the debate around service has been on the national level and has mostly focused on whether Americans should be encouraged or required to do it. Similar to Moore, many of the proposals have come from leaders with a history of military service.

Three years ago, Pete Buttigieg, a Navy veteran and then-mayor of South Bend, Ind., suggested a mandatory national public service program for young Americans to develop skills and to build social cohesion. Roughly a decade ago, U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a Korean War veteran, introduced a failed bill that would have forced every young American to do two years of national service before turning 25.

A number of states, including California and Iowa, have made varying levels of investment in service, most of which are focused on conservation, but Bridgeland said he knows of no other that has enacted a program on the scale of what Moore is proposing.

“If it does come to fruition, it would be a model,” he said. “A common question is: Where are you going to college or what are you doing after? If this took off, it could be: Where are you doing your service year?”

The program, which is part of Moore’s education, economy and social justice agendas, would offer a stipend for work in fields that could include environment, education, and health care. An added incentive could include in-state tuition, he said.

Charisma fueled Wes Moore’s primary win. Now he sharpens his focus on policy.

While the scope of Moore’s plan would be novel, the idea builds off a state program, Maryland Corps, that was proposed six years ago and never got off the ground. The legislature passed a bill in 2016 to create a pilot program for 100 participants between the ages of 17 and 23.

Under the bill, Maryland Corps would have provided stipends of up to $15,000 for corps participants and one-time scholarships of up to $6,000 for those who completed the program. Sen. Shelly L. Hettleman (D-Baltimore County) said the bill passed, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) signed it but didn’t provide any funding for it.

Earlier this year, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed a more expansive bill for 5,000 participants with a $20 million price tag, hoping to launch the effort working with a new Democratic administration. Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) worked with Hogan to set aside $5 million in the 2023 fiscal budget as seed money for the corps program.

“The opportunity to explore public service and serve your community is sort of the thing that we both agree is essential for both expanding opportunity and restoring democracy so that people can do things across lines of difference that they might otherwise not and not have the opportunity to be exposed to one another,” Ferguson, a Teach for America alumnus, said of Moore.

The Democratic nominee, who attended military school and whose mother signed him up for the Army at age 17, said a service year option is personal to him because of the way his military service affected his life.

“The values that I developed in the Army mirror much of what I saw in military school, and it now mirrors in many ways everything that I continue to see now,” Moore told an audience at the Brookings Institution in May of last year, a month before launching his gubernatorial campaign. “We were all under a common bond, and it didn’t matter whether or not we went to college, or voted as Democrats or Republicans, we had a shared mission. We had a common purpose.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/24/wes-moore-service-year-graduates/

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Regarding the Sept. 24 Metro article “Wes Moore floats service year for high school grads”:

Maryland Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore’s proposal for service by high school grads is a worthy but very old idea. It was proposed in 1958 by Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) and Rep. Henry S. Reuss (D-Wis.), but, despite repeated advocacy, it never came to pass.

It remains a most needed and compelling idea. The community needs are great — everything from assisting the care of old and young, feeding the poor, caring for the environment, and on and on. The additional year might improve career decision-making and better balance the fact that only 1 percent provide military service.

Maybe Maryland could lead the way.

Austin Heyman, Bethesda

I was dismayed and frankly terrified to read that Maryland Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore might advocate a year of public service for Maryland high school graduates as a sort of rite of passage.

I came of age when we still had a military draft, and any idea coming even close to a steppingstone back to those days is unthinkable to me. As a woman, I was exempt, but many of my age-mates were coerced to “service,” and some died in Vietnam.

I realize Mr. Moore’s plan might not be for “required” service, but nice ideas can morph quickly into bad ones. I am a card-carrying liberal and would love to vote for Mr. Moore, but this issue could be an impediment. We are not born owing the United States or Maryland a year of service. This plan could become a nightmare. Hell no, don’t go anywhere near that.

Betty Booker, Salisbury

Do you think our schools are worse than ever? You’re wrong.

September 27, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Perspective by Jay Mathews Washington Post Sep 25th 2022

Pandemic was bad, but last half century shows steady improvement, particularly in math

Pessimism about American public schools runs deep, particularly with the latest federal sampling tests showing a sharp drop in achievement among 9-year-olds because of the pandemic.

That does not mean, however, that readers are right when they tell me U.S. education has been getting worse for decades. Some people my age say that because we have warm, but only vague, memories of our days in school. The truth is that until covid-19 hit, our schools had been steadily improving for nearly a half century.

University of Buckingham professor M. Danish Shakeel and Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson have just published their study of U.S. reading and math scores showing significant gains between 1971 and 2017. Math scores grew by nearly four years’ worth of learning and reading scores by nearly one year’s worth of learning during that period.

The two scholars, writing in the journal Education Next based on their recent 87-page article in Educational Psychology Review, also found Black, Hispanic and Asian students improved faster than their White classmates in elementary, middle and high school.

Some reports on American schools have left a different impression. Shakeel and Peterson cite books such as 1994’s “The Decline of Intelligence in America” by Seymour Itzkoff and 2008’s “The Dumbest Generation” by Mark Bauerlein. Those authors argued that American youth were failing to develop basic knowledge and skills because of electronic devices and other bad influences. Bauerlein told me the big problem is the lack of much improvement in high school, which cannot counteract the hours teens pile up on screens in leisure time.

Student test scores plunged during the pandemic

Shakeel and Peterson suggest the rise of achievement during the half century they studied came from improved living standards as well as better schooling. While that was going on, research was revising our understanding of changes in how smart we are.

It was once thought, the two scholars said, that intelligence as measured by IQ tests was “a genetically determined constant that shifted only over the course of eons.” But in the mid-1980s, New Zealand political scientist James Flynn found IQ scores were increasing by three points per decade. Shakeel and Peterson said: “Though Flynn’s work was initially dismissed as an over-interpretation of limited information, his finding was replicated by many others.”

That growth in average intelligence was accompanied by a narrowing of achievement gaps between ethnic groups and income groups in the United States, they said. Over the half century studied, the gap between Black and White students in both reading and math was cut in half. The gains for Black children were largest in elementary school, persisted in middle school and occurred in diminished form through high school.

“It could be due to educationally beneficial changes in family income, parental education and family size within the Black community,” Shakeel and Peterson said. “Other factors may also be in play, such as school desegregation, civil rights laws, early interventions like Head Start and other preschool programs, and compensatory education for low-income students.”

The average performance differences between fourth- and eighth-grade students on the same test are roughly one standard deviation, a common term in statistical analysis. The scholars found elementary school reading scores for White students grew by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared with growth of 28 percent per decade for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students and 13 percent for Hispanic students.

The scholars said, “Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school.”

They said, “Our data consist of more than 7 million student test scores on 160 intertemporally linked math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2007.”

The term “intertemporally linked” means the tests were designed to be comparable over time by repeating some of the same questions in different decades, and other techniques. The tests included the U.S. government’s long-term check on school achievement, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and other exams that compare educational results in different countries.

How are America’s public schools really doing?

The scholars suggested that math scores improved more than reading during the half century they studied because of different rates of change in different kinds of intelligence. An analysis of 271 studies of IQ published by Austrian researchers Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek in 2015 found that during the previous century, fluid reasoning, which involves math, grew more than crystallized knowledge, which involves reading. Better nutrition and less exposure to contagious diseases among mothers and babies the last 100 years may have given fluid reasoning a boost.

There are other possible connections between the condition of our planet and how we did in fourth grade. The learning loss during the pandemic, for instance, may be linked to factors that caused a world slowdown in intellectual growth during World War II, Shakeel and Peterson said. That huge conflict, they said, brought “both school closures and worldwide disruptions of economic and social progress.”

Overall, the last half century has been mostly good for schools, even if we’re not sure why. Shakeel, Peterson and the many other researchers on whom we depend must wait now to see how quickly we recover from the educational ravages of the coronavirus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/25/school-student-performance-pandemic/

How to make friends with your inner critic

September 26, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Try to quiet the harsh, judging voice by naming it, offering counterexamples and staying mindful

By Lakeasha Sullivan Washington Post Sep 21st 2022

Lakeasha Sullivan, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in Atlanta.

You are so stupid. Why do you always screw up? You’ll make a fool of yourself. You look awful.Sign up for the Well+Being newsletter for weekly tips on food, fitness and mental health

Say hello to your inner critic, the silent voice constantly judging your thoughts and behaviors. Harshly.

In my practice, I hear about its abusive attacks from my patients every day. Sometimes it calls them by name, but it generally prefers the pronoun “you.”

My patients are not a unique group. I’ve never met a person who doesn’t have an inner critic. It “is not volitional, it is already in your nervous system,” says Steven C. Hayes, foundation professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Reno, and co-developer of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). “It’s not going away.”

8 ways to feel less anxious about things beyond your control

Its methods may seem harsh, but its intentions are noble. The inner critic is hypervigilant, anxiously scanning the environment for threats. “The inner critic is activated when we’re trying to survive, because it’s trying to keep us alive,” says Kathy Steele, a psychotherapist in Atlanta. “Only, it sees everything as a threat at some point, especially other people.”

Social rejection is a real threat to our survival, and the inner critic tries to protect us by shaming us before someone else might. It attacks to push us to develop characteristics that society rewards, such as competence. It calls us stupid [or fill in the blank] to motivate us to do better.

Are the alarms occasionally justified? Perhaps. “Sometimes it’s emotional wisdom,” Hayes points out.

‘Whose voice is this?’

The inner critic “is built upon and through our experiences over time,” Steele says. The inner critics of many of my patients use the same phrases as a parent would when they were young. When asked “Whose voice is this?” or “Who said this to you?” it can be a lightbulb moment.

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Its harshness also can be contextual and dependent on a person’s sensitivity toward being shamed, their mood and the situation. For example, I have patients whose inner critic regularly berates them about their appearance but remains quiet about other issues until a significant stressor appears.

One such stressor was the pandemic. In my practice, I noticed a significant increase in my patients anxiously comparing themselves to friends, colleagues and even strangers about their ability to cope with the demands of family and work. Online, it looked as if everyone else was thriving — learning a language, baking bread, reinventing themselves.

The inner critic uses social comparisons to determine if you need to do more to be socially accepted. Trapped in isolated bubbles without everyday social cues, many an inner critic had people feeling as if they were falling woefully short of elusive goal posts. There were times when nearly every session involved a patient convinced that they were inherently deficient.

The inner critic rarely speaks on matters of life or death, so suppressing or ignoring it can be tempting. That can provide merciful, albeit brief, relief.

Exerting mental and emotional control to suppress a thought, however, takes energy and can result in psychological depletion. Running out of psychological resources not only affects our mood, but can also make us more passive and less persistent, and cause us to struggle with problem solving. Now we’ve given our inner critic even more ammunition to use against us.

How to befriend your inner critic

Rather than trying to suppress negative thoughts,learning to live with the inner critic is an essential skill that we can learn. Here are some strategies that can help.

Name your critic: Many of my patients name their inner critic and create a fictional backstory for it. The inner critic may be a disgruntled relative or a scared child. “What are the benefits of it? Figure out if it’s tapping into parts of your history,” Hayes says.

This strategy involves changing your perspective about the inner critic. The subtle shift of “third personing” the inner critic can be liberating. “Make friends with it. Dialogue with it. Be curious,” Steele suggests.

Offer counterevidence: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches us how to counter negative self-talk. This empirically validated approach capitalizes on holes in the inner critic’s logic. For instance, if your inner voice says, “You’re such a failure,” you should cite examples of success. “I know I’m not a failure. I’m good at my job.”

Could therapy ease your coronavirus stress? How to decide, what to expect and where to find it.

Be open to painful thoughts and emotions: A recent study by Hayes and others found that being open to painful thoughts and emotions is an important therapeutic tool that accounts for significant change among patients in therapy. “What if you could take a magic pill and erase all of your pain? But you also had to remove the wisdom and values you learned from it?” Hayes asks. “I’ve never had a client who wants to make that bargain.”

Stay mindful: Mindfulness is another powerful distancing technique. “When we hear the inner critic being harsh, we could notice it, recognize it, thank it for trying to help, remind ourselves that we would never say things like that to someone we care about and see if we can be a little more kind to ourselves,” writes Ruth Baer, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky who specializes in mindfulness.

“Practicing mindfulness is like mental exercise,” says Baer, who compares it to physical exercise. “It’s not always fun or comfortable and just doing it a few times won’t have much impact.” But with regular practice, you can reap the benefits. “We learn to respond more skillfully to difficult experiences, and that can lead to a greater sense of peace and calm,” Baer says.

I have recommended apps such as Headspace to my patients as a starting point, and Baer agrees. She also recommends exploring mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) courses. Many centers offer evidence-based courses and free resources online, such as the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion and the Mindfulness and Health Institute.

Use the inner critic for growth: Once understood, the inner critic can be useful. It can, for instance, help us lead a values-driven life. Chronically late people, for example, often experience a harsh inner critic who scolds them for looking bad in front of others and being immature. But if the patient values reliability, they can thank the inner critic for reminding them of this value and start applying time-management skills. In this and other cases, the inner critic brings something important to our attention, and we can use the experience to align our actions with our values.

Are you a mental health professional who would like to contribute to this column? Email OnYourMind@washpost.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/20/how-to-deal-with-inner-critic/

Montgomery students are meeting literacy expectations but are behind in math

September 23, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Nicole Asbury

Montgomery County students met the school system’s performance target in reading but fell short of goals in math for the last school year, according to academic data shared with the school board Thursday.

Overall, 71.7 percent of students met academic standards in literacy. That was 5.8 percentage points higher than the goal for the 2021-2022 school year, which was originally set for 65.9 percent.

Math scores were lower, with 61.2 percent of students meetingexpectations; lower than the 64.1 percent target.

The data follows trends seen nationally of students who are continuing to catch up after two years of disrupted learningduring the pandemic, with the district’s economically disadvantaged students and students of colordisproportionately lagging behind.

Most Prince George’s students scoring below grade level on district tests

The academic data presented to the board focused on students in second, fifth, eighth and 11th grades. It was further categorized by race and economic status.The results are a mix of students’ report card grades, district tests and other outside exams — such as state-level exams, AP tests and the SAT. Scores were presented for each of the tests.

Student scores on report cards were higher than those on district tests and outside assessments, the data showed. In math, for example, fifth- and eighth-graders’ report card scores were twice that of the district’s test scores.

During a discussion on math scores, Kisha Logan, director of pre-K through 12th grade curriculum, said district assessments depict a student’s understanding of a topic during a specific moment in time. But report card grades generally reflect a longer period of time, after a teacher has the time to help a student better understand a topic.

Board member Lynne Harris (At Large) saidshe’d heard from teachers that because of the amount of re-teaching that has had to be done, the district’s assessments have tested students on topics they hadn’t yet gotten to in the classroom.

“This is a very common discrepancy that you see in districts,” said board member Scott Joftus (District 3), who is also a consultant for superintendents and school districts across the country. “One thing that I think we need to be careful about is that there’s not a misunderstanding among our educators about what the level of expectation is.”

Joftus added that normally, when data collected directly from the classroom — like the report card data — shows twice the amount of students being successful compared with district assessments, “it means that our expectations are somewhat out of alignment.”

Officials from the school district’s curriculum office said they plan to focus on professional development initiatives for teachers, which would include training on different data tools to monitor student progress. They also use the data to better help students who have a significant need, which could include targeted tutoring before or after school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/23/montomgery-county-student-test-scores/

Civic Engagement as an Ideology!!!A Cautionary Read

September 22, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The Ideology of Civic Engagement | State University of New York Press

An interesting book of research on AmeriCorps that challenges us deeply to think about the mission and the structures that we operate in that often are intended to make us ineffective.

Sara Carpenter Thesis Abstract
Over the last twenty years, the academic work on citizenship education and democracy promotion has grown exponentially. This research investigates the United States federal government‘s cultivation of a politics of citizenship‘ through the Corporation for National and Community Service and the AmeriCorps program. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theory and institutional ethnography, this research examines the ways in which democratic learning is organized within the AmeriCorps program through the category of civic engagement‘ and under the auspices of federal regulations that coordinate the practice of AmeriCorps programs translocally.

The findings from this research demonstrate that the federal regulations of the AmeriCorps program mandate a practice and create an environment in which politics,‘ understood broadly as having both partisan and non-partisan dimensions, are actively avoided in formalized learning activities within the program. The effect of these regulations is to create an ideological environment in which learning is separated from experience and social problems are disconnected from the political and material relations in which they are constituted.

Further, the AmeriCorps program cultivates an institutional discourse in which good citizenship is equated with participation at the local scale, which pivots on a notion of community service that is actively disengaged from the State. Through its reliance on these forms of democratic consciousness, the AmeriCorps program engages in reproductive praxis, ultimately reproducing already existing inequalities within U.S. society.

The primary elements of this reproductive praxis have been identified as a local fetish‘ and the democratic management of inequality.‘

The local fetish refers to the solidification of the local as the preferential terrain of democratic engagement and is characterized by an emphasis on face-to-face moral relationships, local community building, and small-scale politics.

The democratic management of inequality refers to the development of discursive practices and the organization of volunteer labor in the service of poverty amelioration, which is in turn labeled good citizenship.‘ This research directs our attention to a more complicated notion of praxis and its relationship to the reproduction of social relations. Also, this research brings into focus the problem of the conceptualization of civil society and its relationship to democracy and capitalism

__________________________________________________________________________________

What Is Civic Engagement? Definition and Examples

Final Comments from the Dissertation
As I brainstormed elements to include in the conclusion to this thesis, a friend asked me what I hoped my research participants would get from reading this text. In that moment, I had to confront the reality that I have not necessarily written this thesis for them. I have written for myself and for those like me who are struggling with their own understanding of themselves in relation to questions of social justice and transformation; for those who have similarly grown tired of the limits of the progressive imagination and the lack of curiosity they confront in social activism.

That may sound deeply cynical and dismissive, but it was precisely how I felt when I left the United States to pursue this doctoral degree. I felt as though everyone around me was utterly satisfied with the uncomplicated understandings of social life that circulated through leftist‘ politics and that they genuinely wanted a little bit of social change to be enough social
change. If being unsatisfied with these limitations is being cynical, then that is fine with me. I hope that students who are interested in political consciousness will take from this work that solutions might also be problems and that doing good‘ is harder than it seems. Also, I hope my readers glean not just the importance of critique, but the importance of critical reflection understood as a dialectical relation between going forward and looking back. Perhaps I will concede that Dewey might have been right on that point.

Because of this, I hope that my research participants will think critically about the many paradoxical elements I have attempted to hold together in this research. Perhaps some will feel that I have not accurately represented their experience because my window into this world was partially obscured by my own position. I suspect others will feel I have said things that needed to be said.

If these research participants go on to do what Obama, Bush, and Clinton have envisioned that they might, that is lead long lives of public service, I hope they will understand that the conditions of their work are not natural or neutral, but political constructions. That everything around them is a contestation of power. That they, who so earnestly hope to do good, are engaged in class struggle, whether they like it or not. I hope that they understand that their year of service was not pointless or worthless; important learning can come from the experience of volunteerism. I am evidence of that fact and I saw many of my research participants grow and deepen in their intellectual and emotional engagement over the course of the six months I spent with them.

I hope that they remember that their discomfort and unease about their own work and their own place in the world is an important thing to hold on to. I remember that one day, in one group, we discussed that if you hurt yourself you feel pain; your body is telling you something is wrong. If you go to serve at the homeless shelter and you feel guilty, your body is telling you that something is wrong. I hope they will take seriously what Lillian Smith (1946), another of my heroes, said about society‘s struggle to transform itself

: “Always the conscience hurt; always 298 there were doubts and scruples; always hate was tempered with a little love, and always folks were inconsistent…ideals seemed to be dead, but at least their ghosts haunted men‟s [sic] souls”  (P. 68) 

file:///C:/Users/GBTLA-Guest/Documents/Americorps%20Work/2023/Carpenter_Sara_C_201111_PhD_thesis.pdf.pdf

Mental Health Is Political

September 21, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Danielle Carr

Dr. Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A. Sept. 20, 2022 New York Times Sep 20th 2022

What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?

The mental health toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of extensive commentary in the United States, much of it focused on the sharp increase in demand for mental health services now swamping the nation’s health care capacities. The resulting difficulty in accessing care has been invoked widely as justification for a variety of proposed solutions, such as the profit-driven growth of digital health and teletherapy start-ups and a new mental health plan that the Biden administration unveiled earlier this year.

But are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.

Once we begin to ask questions about medicalization, the entire framing of the mental health toll of the Covid crisis — an “epidemic” of mental illness, as various publications have called it, rather than a political crisis with medical effects — begins to seem inadequate.

Of course, nobody can deny that there has been an increase in mental and emotional distress. To take two of the most common diagnoses, a study published in 2021 in The Lancet estimated that the pandemic had caused an additional 53.2 million cases of major depressive disorder and 76.2 million cases of anxiety disorder globally.

Let’s think about this. The fact that incidences of psychological distress have increased in the face of objectively distressing circumstances is hardly surprising. As a coalition of 18 prominent mental health scholars wrote in a 2020 paper in The Lancet: “Predictions of a ‘tsunami’ of mental health problems as a consequence of [Covid] and the lockdown are overstated; feelings of anxiety and sadness are entirely normal reactions to difficult circumstances, not symptoms of poor mental health.”

Things get even less surprising when you look more closely at the data: If you bracket the (entirely predictable) spike in psychological distress among health care workers (a fact that itself only reinforces the idea that the major causal vectors in play here are structural), the most relevant predictors of mental health are indexes of economic security. Of course, it’s not simply a question of the numbers on your bank statement — although that is a major predictor of outcomes — but of whether you live in a society where the social fabric has been destroyed.

Before we go further, let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that mental illnesses are fake, or somehow nonbiological. Pointing out the medicalization of social and political problems does not mean denying that such problems produce real biological conditions; it means asking serious questions about what is causing those conditions. If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.

This principle is what some health researchers mean by the idea that there are social determinants of health — that effective long-term solutions for many medicalized problems require nonmedical — this is to say, political — means. We all readily acknowledge that for diseases like diabetes and hypertension — diseases with a very clear biological basis — an individual’s body is only part of the causal reality of the disease. Treating the root cause of the “epidemic” of diabetes effectively, for example, would happen at the level of serious infrastructural changes to the available diet and activity levels of a population, not by slinging medications or pouring funding into clinics that help people make better choices in supermarkets filled with unregulated, unhealthy food. You’ve got to stop the guy running over people with the car.

But if the public health consensus around diabetes has shifted somewhat in response to what we know, it’s been remarkably hard to achieve the same when it comes to mental health.

Psychiatric sciences have long acknowledged the fact that stress is causally implicated in an enormous range of mental disorders, referring to the “stress-diathesis model” of mental illness. That model incorporates the well-documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop a given diagnosis, from depression to schizophrenia.

The causal relationship may be even more direct. Remarkably, all throughout decades of research on mood disorders, scientists doing animal studies had to create animal models of anxiety and depression — that is, animals who showed behaviors that looked like human anxiety and depression — by subjecting them to weeks or months of chronic stress. Zap animals with unpredictable and painful shocks they can’t escape, force them to survive barely survivable conditions for long enough, put them in social situations where they are chronically brutalized by those higher up in the social hierarchy — and just like that, the animals will consistently start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.PART I

This doesn’t mean that all psychiatric symptoms are caused by stress, but it does mean that a whole lot of them almost certainly are. There is increasingly strong evidence for the idea that chronic elevation of stress hormones has downstream effects on the neural architecture of the brain’s cognitive and emotional circuits. The exact relationship between different types of stress and any given cluster of psychiatric symptoms remains unclear — why do some people react to stress by becoming depressed, while others become impulsive or enraged? — indicating that whatever causal mechanism exists is mediated by a variety of genetic and social conditions. But the implications of the research are very clear: When it comes to mental health, the best treatment for the biological conditions underlying many symptoms might be ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives.

And here is the core of the problem: Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to address the underlying cause of population-level increases in mental and emotional distress. It does, however, work really well if you’re trying to come up with a solution that everybody in power can agree on, so that the people in power can show they’re doing something about the problem. Unfortunately, the solution that everyone can agree on is not going to work.

Everyone agrees, for instance, that it would be good to reduce the high rate of diabetes plaguing the United States. But once we begin to de-medicalize it, diabetes starts to look like a biological problem arising from a vast swathe of political problems: transportation infrastructure that keeps people sedentary in cars, food insecurity that keeps a racialized underclass dependent on cheap and empty calories, the power of corporate lobbies to defang regulations, and so on. These are problems that people do not agree on how to solve, in part because some are materially benefiting from this state of affairs. This is to say, these are political problems, and solving them will mean taking on the groups of people who benefit from the status quo.

That the status quo is once again benefiting the usual suspects is all too obvious in the booming market of V.C.-backed mental health tech start-ups, which promise to solve the crisis through a gig economy model for psychiatric care that has been criticized for selling psychiatric medication irresponsibly, with little accountability.

But even publicly funded solutions risk falling into the trap of medicalizing a problem and failing to address the deeper structural causes of the crisis. President Biden’s plan for mental health, for instance, makes many genuflections to the language of “community” and “behavioral health.” A section outlining a plan for “creating healthy environments” makes a great show of saying the right things, including: “We cannot transform mental health solely through the health care system. We must also address the determinants of behavioral health, invest in community services and foster a culture and environment that broadly promotes mental wellness and recovery.”

But then the plan goes on to focus on several proposals aimed at regulating social media platforms — a strange target that seems relevant only in a downstream way from major infrastructural determinants of health, like wealth inequality and public services — until you remember that it’s one of the few policy goals that both Democrats and Republicans share.

Sure, parts of the proposal do seem to offer genuinely needed care. For instance, a proposal to establish scores of behavioral health clinics that can offer subsidized substance use treatment like methadone tapering is an exigently needed — if depressingly belated — response to the phenomenon of mass opiate addiction pushed by corporations like Purdue Pharma and Walgreens.

But despite the fact that much of the proposal seems to have been drafted with the opiate addiction crisis in mind, the billboard-size implications of the so-called opioid epidemic seem to have failed to register. It is hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of political conditions undergoing the reification switch into a medicalized epidemic than what everyone now knows happened: The despair of the post-industrial underclass was methodically and intentionally milked by pharmaceutical companies for all it was worth. It was so obvious that at last even a political establishment that remains largely indifferent to the poor eventually had to get around to sort of doing something.

And yet when the plan addresses suicide, it focuses on crisis intervention — as if suicide were a kind of unfortunate natural occurrence, like lightning strikes, rather than an expression of the fact that growing numbers of people are becoming convinced that the current state of affairs gives them no reason to hope for a life they’d want to live.

The proposal’s main plan to address the so-called epidemic of suicide has been the rebranding of a national suicide hotline — which will encourage callers on the brink of killing themselves to refrain from doing so, and may or may not connect them to resources like three cognitive behavioral therapy sessions (most likely conducted through teletherapy) that insurance companies will be required to cover for their customers — depending on what the state the caller is in has decided about funding. (Like all of Biden’s proposal, the plan is yet to be passed into law.) It’s not so much that the hotline is a bad idea; it’s that the sheer scale of failure to comprehend the political reality that it displays, the utter inability to register how profoundly the “suicide epidemic” indicts the status quo, is ultimately more terrifying than outright indifference. It’s worth recalling that in the 2016 presidential election, even though Hillary Clinton touted a “suicide prevention” campaign plank, communities most affected by so-called deaths of despair voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who addressed, however disingenuously, their economic situation and promised to bring back jobs.

Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to infrastructure that buffers them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.

A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power if we are going to win solutions.

Danielle Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A. She is working on a book about the history of neuroscience.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html