“Schools Don't Give a Fuck About Mental Health”: Student Crises & Adult Indifference in a High School

• In Event: Schooling and Intergenerational Mental Health

Abstract

Mental health is an important concern among adolescents, and at school, discussions about it occur both informally and as part of the official curriculum. In this paper, I show how students at a large public high school perceived the school’s role in promoting or threatening their mental health. I also consider how adults at the school engaged with mental health as a feature of the official curriculum. I draw on three years of ethnographic observations (2019-2022) at a site I call Hamilton High School, as well as 108 interviews with Hamilton students and faculty/staff. I find that adults in the school did little to support students’ mental health, framing the topic when part of the official curriculum as an unpleasant or undesirable subject. At times, adults’ behaviors
actively undermined students’ efforts to support their own and their peers’ mental health. I present vignettes from two teachers and four students to demonstrate how mental health was discussed and how students perceived adults’ responses to their struggles. These findings highlight how mental health is conceptualized and impacted in the context of a large public high school. Overall, this work contributes to literature about schools’ influence on adolescents’ mental health, barriers to effective student-teacher relationships, and schools’ relational cultures.

Author

• Karlyn J. Gorski, University of Chicago