Schools need to teach pupils skills to maintain good mental health – here's how

Schools are often where children’s and adolescents’ mental health problems are identified, writes Dusana Dorjee. While there is ever growing demand for mental health support for pupils, such as in-school counselling and mentoring, the focus now – just like for any health problem – should be more on prevention than intervention.

Prevention makes sense financially, given that specialist mental health services for children and adolescents are currently overloaded, with long waiting lists. More importantly, helping young people develop traits, skills and strategies to protect their mental health can have a lifelong positive impact. And if mental health skills are broadly taught in schools and applied by pupils in a supportive learning context (and where possible also involve family, and are put into practice outside school) the health improvements could, in time, benefit the whole population.