Schools told to encourage children 'not to label normal feelings as mental health conditions'
New guidance issued to schools advises teaching children that “worrying and feeling down" are not mental health disorders in an effort to help children "develop grit and resilience."
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In new guidance for schools, teachers have been instructed to discourage students from self-diagnosing common emotions like anxiety and sadness as mental health issues.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told The Telegraph: "For too many children today, their understanding of how to manage their mood and regulate their emotions is coming from social media, rather than their parents, teachers or trained professionals."
“Our new RSHE [relationships, sex and health education] curriculum will equip children to develop grit and resilience from the get-go, helping them understand that feeling a little down or anxious for a while is normal and nothing to worry about."
She continued: "With mental health, just like physical health, prevention is better than cure - which is why we are also making sure there is access to mental health support in every school and reducing child poverty with more free school meals, delivering on our Plan for Change to give every child the best start in life.”
Schools have been issued with new instructions to make sure lessons make the difference between genuine mental health conditions and ordinary emotions clear.
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The guidance says pupils should be taught “that worrying and feeling down are normal, can affect everyone at different times and are not in themselves a sign of a mental-health condition”.
It adds that teachers should tell students how “managing those feelings can be helped by seeing them as normal."
The guidance says schools should teach children the “characteristics” of common types of mental ill health, including anxiety and depression.
They should also include “carefully presented factual information about the prevalence and characteristics of more serious mental-health conditions”.
The guidances says this information "should not be discussed in a way that encourages normal feelings to be labelled as mental-health conditions.”
The changes come in new instructions on how to teach RHSE, which were issued to schools last week.
Some of the instructions on mental health had been contained in a previous draft of the guidance drawn up by the previous Conservative government.
Ms Phillipson she added the requirement that schools must not teach about mental health in a way that leads to pupils self-diagnosing with conditions.
The change to the guidance comes after Ms Phillipson pledged that young people would be taught the value of “grit” to help them deal with life’s “ups and downs”.