Teachers Can Make A Difference—My Experience with Mental Illness

Posted on 14/02/2012 | 0 Comments

Grade 9 --singing in the choir at a school assembly. I had never felt uncomfortable performing but this time was different. I felt “normal” at the beginning, but partway through I kind of zoned out. I felt weird and really scared, the deep kind of fear that takes hold of your whole body right down to the pit of your stomach. Thankfully this only lasted a couple of seconds and soon the song was over. I didn’t really know what it was and I forgot about it. Little did I know I had experienced my first panic attack.  
 
For the next couple of months I had a few more similar experiences but was still able to go about my life as I had before. Then I got an assignment for my Health class. Everyone was asked to do a presentation on a mental health topic. I remembered my teacher in grade seven talking about his personal experience with Panic Disorder and it reminded me of what I was experiencing, so I began researching the list of symptoms.   The majority were frighteningly similar to what I had experienced. I thought “Oh my god. I have this”. So I presented my topic to the class. I even ended the presentation by talking about what I had experienced and my suspicions about having panic disorder. 
 
The next step was to start seeing a psychologist, and things did get better despite lots of bumps along the road. Before my grade 12 year, I was barely able to leave the house for fear of having a panic attack, and was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to return to school. One thing that was really helped make it easier to go back to school was knowing there were teachers I could trust to be sensitive to what I was going through. They continued to treat me the same as everyone else after they knew my situation, and also understood that there may be times when I needed to do things differently than other students to manage my mental illness, such as leaving the classroom for a minute in order to calm down when having a panic attack and then returning to the classroom.
 
It is also important to for young people to feel like they have a place where they can openly discuss what they are feeling without being judged or ridiculed. The reason I felt I could share my experiences with my PDR class was because my teacher had created a safe, non-judgemental and confidential environment. He did this by telling all of us at the beginning of the class that we would be discussing some topics that might make people uncomfortable but that we all had a right to be informed and what was said in the room stayed in it.
 
I‘m telling this story because I want others to learn from my experiences and to emphasize the importance of including mental health education in school curriculum. If my teacher didn’t have the extreme courage to share his own experiences I wouldn’t have had any idea about what was going on with me. As scary as it was, it would have been even more frightening if I hadn’t had some understanding of what was happening. I hope that by telling my story I can help someone out there understand what they’re going through and help those around them understand what they need to feel supported and manage their illness. If you have someone in your life dealing with mental illness and want to support them the best thing you can do is talk to them open and honestly without judgement so they can tell you what they need.
 
--Emily Atkinson
 
Emily Atkinson holds a degree from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, and hopes to go back to school to become a Mental Health Specialist. She is currently working at a child care centre in Halifax, and is an active member of the Youth Advisory Council for the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health. The Chair works directly with youth to provide easy-to-understand materials about mental health and the brain.  The materials are offered free to parents, families, physicians and anyone who wants them. Visit teenmentalhealh.org for more information.
 

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This is a great set of comments and rings very true. 

I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles.  After all, scientists are human beings too!  But science is different than scientists. 

The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict.  Science is not about finding truth.  It is only about being less wrong most of the time.  The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe.  The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct!  It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”.  It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.

t does not drive our beliefs.  It does however challenge our beliefs.  In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context.  That is one of the great features of science. 

But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding.  And thus it is nasty, brutish and long.  As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.

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