Classroom Update #7

April30

Depression

While there is much talk about increases in diagnoses of psychological maladies around attention issues and autism among school age students, I’m experiencing a bubble of depression problems in my classroom, that is starting to be troubling. I’m going to stick to generalities so as not to breach privacy, etc. What I will say is that when I first brought it up to a co-worker, they posited something about entitlement and expectations, and I had to share some of the very real stressors these kids are experiencing; a family death, a family health crisis, and a case with hints of family violence in the history. How serious is this? Serious enough that I’ve had concerns about physical safety, and I’ll leave it at that.

But given the high levels of family stress, poverty, etc. that so many of our children live in at this time, I really can’t be surprised. The scary part is that I’m not even in a high poverty school. We have a school psychologist and nurse in one day a week, solely to do assessments related to special education. There is no counselor, social worker, etc. to work with the over 500 students in my school. Lord knows, we could use it.

Image credit: Depression on Flickr

by posted under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »    
One Comment to

“Classroom Update #7”

  1. May 27th, 2016 at 3:55 am      Reply Graham Wegner Says:

    Hi Alice,
    You raise a really good point here – and I feel that this is certainly a real issue at my school. We are categorised as being a disadvantaged school (under South Australian guidelines) and we have a counsellor and a wellbeing coordinator and they are stretched to their limits dealing with kids falling under this issue, and more often than not, the child’s extended family. Maybe we are also getting better at recognising depression symptoms, and in Australia, there is a lot of work being done to remove the stigma from the past, but recognition and acknowledgement is one thing – but putting time and resources into place to make a difference still has some way to go.
    Thanks again for your post, Graham


Email will not be published

Website example

Your Comment:

rssrss
rssrss

Links of Interest


License

Creative Commons License
All of Ms. Mercer's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


Skip to toolbar