The construction of youth mental health: Colonised thinking and the role of schools

Professor Katie Fitzpatrick, University of Auckland/Waipapa Taumata Rau, New Zealand

Email: k.fitzpatrick@auckland.ac.nz

Homepage https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/k-fitzpatrick

Abstract

Young people’s mental health and wellbeing is increasingly on the global agenda, and education is being positioned as one answer to a perceived mental health crisis.

Schools are increasingly seen as possible sites of impact and intervention. Many of the current school-based interventions draw on research framing mental health and wellbeing exclusively within a western psychological framework and so focus at the level of the individual.

While these programmes capture the imagination of many educators, they tend to ignore the social and political contexts of mental health and wellbeing and, in particular, how forms of exclusion at the intersection of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racism, and disability coalesce to frame wellbeing at school and in other settings.

This paper is a critical engagement with mental health discourse and its increasing convergence with pressures in and on education settings.

I employ the notion of coloniality to think through the implications for the ways youth mental health is represented and what this means for school policy and practice.

I argue that the way mental health is measured, reported and then taken up as a project in schools is limited and problematic – and reflects coloniality and colonised ways of thinking. Relatedly, it forces certain educational policy agendas and moves to psychologised approaches to practice.