Teach Secondary Issue 13.4

I blame NickyMorgan. There’s been approximately 43,000* Education Secretaries since, so you could be forgiven for not remembering, but it was Morgan who introduced a package of measures to ‘instil character’ in young people. After this, the word ‘resilience’ seemed to crop up endlessly in conversations around mental health in schools. As a mental health campaigner and educator, I was asked at the time ‘What can we do to make kids more resilient?’ ad infinitum– by parents, media interviewers and anyone who I happened to share my job title with in a social situation. Eventually, I got to the stage where I simply refused to answer, because the ensuing conversation would never be fruitful. Victim blaming rarely ever is. The notorious ‘Gen Z’ According to NHS statistics, 1 in 5 children has a probable mental health disorder (see bit.ly/ts134-ND1) . Imagine, for one moment, if 1 in 5 children currently had a broken leg. Would our default stance be to suggest that these children’s bones were somehow built differently from their peers? That they were clumsier, and therefore deserved their fate? Or would we rather ask, ‘What is it in the environment of these young people that’s causing this outcome for so many, and how can we make it safer?’ I’d like to think we’d opt for the latter – because whether we’re talking about mental or physical health, that’s invariably the correct response. The teenagers attending school circa 2014 are now the notorious ‘Gen Z’ that everyone seems to be constantly criticising. In April 2024, the Secretary of State forWork and Pensions, Mel Stride, claimed that “Mental health culture has gone too far,” going on to tell The Telegraph that, “The real risk now is that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions, which then actually serves to hold people back, and ultimately, drive up the benefits bill.” This prompted Sky News to call upon the impeccable expertise of former Apprentice candidate turned media personality Ryan-Mark Parsons, who declared that Gen Z should aspire to emulate the ‘stiff upper lip’ of their Boomer forebears. The unspoken protocol There’s more than one screamingly obvious problemwith this stance. Firstly, as numerous studies have shown, for a long time the unspoken protocol was to cite a ‘bad back’, ‘migraine’ or ‘stomach bug’ to explain absences fromwork which were, in fact, mental health-related. Indeed, these common physical symptoms can actually be a result of ignoring mental health concerns. Furthermore, for the Boomer generation there’s a measurable point of vulnerability for suicide around retirement age, particularly for men. Around a third of Gen Z don’t drink alcohol, whereas older generations are more likely to use it to manage stress. When we instruct young people to employ a ‘stiff upper lip’, what we actually mean is, ‘Could you just self-medicate through your working career, then have a crisis at the point of life when you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself? Ta.’ That’s before we even take into account howmuch the world has changed. Young people generally have less access to community, exhibit higher rates of loneliness and face greater academic pressures. They’re also more likely to live in poverty, less likely to earn a wage that covers their bills and stand less chance of moving out of their family home and into a place of their own before their 30s. Aterror in knowing This generation also carries super computers in their pockets that give them access to unlimited information from across the globe – though as Bowie once sang, ‘There’s a terror in knowing what this world is about.’ Oh, and ‘this world’ also happens to be on fire, while the warnings of climate experts go ignored. If anything, I’d say if you don’t feel anxious right now, you probably aren’t paying attention. Gen Z should be applauded for having the emotional literacy to identify anxiety and lowmood, and ask for support. As the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurty once famously said, ‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’ We can respond to the mental health emergency among young people by extolling the merits of ‘resilience’ and ‘stiff upper lips’ – or we can open our eyes, start listening and change our expectations, economics and environment for the better Natasha Devon Natasha Devon is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner on issues relating to education and mental health; to find out more, visit natashadevon.com or follow @_NatashaDevon *actually, 8 25 teachwire.net/secondary S C H O O L O F T H O U G H T