On the face of it, mental-health lessons in schools seemed like an excellent idea. Young people’s mental health is worse now than it was in the past, and one-to-one treatment is hard to access. If you teach young people about mental health at school – which often includes teaching techniques based on therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or mindfulness – it’s more accessible. If you teach these concepts to everyone in a class – so-called universal interventions – you avoid missing the under-the-radar kids who aren’t seeking help, and avoid the potential stigma of singling anyone out. If you teach the information when pupils are young enough, even better: you might prevent mental-health problems from starting in the first place.
At least, that was the idea. The reality is more sobering. Researchers have now run many studies testing the impact of universal school mental-health interventions and have found that they don’t really improve mental health. When improvements are found, they’re small – a tiny average shift on a symptom questionnaire – and the quality of the research is often poor, meaning it’s hard to trust the findings. The best-designed studies show that interventions don’t work at all: no improvement in mental health symptoms, either immediately after the course of lessons or later down the line.
In fact, some studies have found that universal mental-health lessons actually make things worse. There are now high-quality studies showing that school lessons based on CBT, mindfulness, dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) and general mental-health awareness lead to a small increase in symptoms of mental-health difficulties. There is evidence of other bad outcomes too, such as decreased prosocial behaviour or decreased relationship quality with parents.
