People have been struggling with mental health for centuries whether that is physically, mentally, or emotionally. People suffer from things such as depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, ADHD, OCD, panic disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders, etc. Student’s mental health as I see it today and all around me is not in a secure state. Students are losing motivation every day to complete simple tasks. This affects how they do in school and potentially how they do in the future. So for teachers to understand their students more I feel that having a mental health class in schools should be more common considering a lot of students go through mental health problems.   

Let’s talk about how students may perform physically throughout the day. School for most schools starts between 7:45-8:00 and runs until 2:40-3:00. That is a long day for students, especially high schoolers, sitting all day and going through lecture after lecture until the end of the school day. Students become drained by the end of the day and physically do not want to function anymore or find it hard to function at all. It’s hard to go home and have the motivation to get up and do homework and instead, all we want to do is go home and lay down and take a nap. It’s especially draining if students engage in after-school activities such as sports, and clubs, or have an after-school job. And I know when students talk about their exhaustion, we always get the same response, “How many hours did you sleep?” I think having a class that talks about mental health would give more education to everyone on why students are so physically exhausted on a day-to-day basis.

Next up is the student’s emotional health. Stress is something that everyone deals with. Coming into school stressed can be hard on a student. Maybe they have a really important test coming up and they are stressed cause they feel like maybe they haven’t studied enough or the material that was shown wasn’t going through their head and was going through one ear and coming out the other. It can stress a student out when they really try in a class and still can’t get the material down. I know that many students can try hard in a class and still fail the class and eventually, they will give up because they have that mindset that they just will never be able to do it. Students can become a lot more irritated and angry when this happens to the point where emotionally they cannot do it and give up on their schooling

Now let’s talk about what students struggle with at school. Mentally most of the time students aren’t there. School is a scary place for students where it can introduce many opportunities to things. What I mean by that is it can become an environment where things such as bullying, and peer pressure can get out of hand. It can become hard for students to want to come to school and that can affect their education because they are too worried about getting bullied at school rather than their actual learning. It can also put self-esteem issues on the student. They can lose sense of who they are as a person and lose respect for themselves. In all, having a class where the students can focus on themselves and take time for themselves I think would be a great way of starting to better the students’ mental health and hopefully to fully understand the students.