Think you’re busy? Spare a thought for your average schoolchild. From their morning maths class to their after-school piano lesson, pupils’ days are jam-packed — with the pressures of academic success weighing them down like a textbook-laden rucksack.
At the same time, their phones don’t stop buzzing, overloading already crammed heads with photos, gossip and streams of information that keep them constantly connected. The result? An almost-inevitable short-circuit in young, frazzled minds. And it is their mental health that is suffering the consequences.
A brief scan of the statistics proves just that: while one in four young people will experience mental health problems before the age of 18, nearly 80,000 children in the UK are today suffering from depression. The numbers are just as dramatic among British Jews, stresses Laurie Rackind, chief executive of Jami (the Jewish Association for the Mentally Ill). “This is, without doubt, an issue that will affect every member of our community in some way,” he says. “But even for the most psychotic conditions, early intervention can enable recovery in 80 per cent of cases.”
And indeed, there is now a turning tide in the way educators tackle mental health, with greater attention being paid to ensuring a pupil’s emotional health is addressed alongside his or her academic achievements. Students are being taught to recognise their mental state, express it, and devote space to its well-being, taking time out during their busy days to reflect and “simply be”.
The practice has a name, a mainstream following, and even an all-party parliamentary group devoted to its promotion. It is widely referred to as “mindfulness”, and involves employing breathing and meditation techniques to help the practitioner concentrate calmly on the present moment.
One in four young people will experience mental health problems
Last month, the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group presented its interim report, in which it pushed for the meditative practice to be rolled out in schools across the UK. This follows eight previous parliamentary hearings on the issue; most recently, a meeting last November gathered together 100 policymakers with educational leaders and mental-health workers to consider the next step in ensuring the wellbeing of UK schoolchildren.
With mental-health problems costing the UK £70 billion a year, the government is taking notice. And meditation, long considered a “hippy” pastime, now looks set to be as regular in a child’s daily routine as morning assembly or lunch-time break.
“Our role is to get it on the agenda — to see it made part of the curriculum,” says Yoga Bowers, chairman of the non-profit Mindfulness Foundation, which is campaigning to see mindfulness meditation made available to all British schoolchildren by 2022. “If there were no gaps between words, people would be speaking gobbledygook. The same applies to education: the content is important, but so is the space within that.”
Beth Kerr, deputy headteacher of Immanuel College in Bushey and director of the school’s pastoral policy, agrees. “Mental health is so important,” she says. “It underpins absolutely everything. My aims are for our children to understand what mental health is, to recognise what is good and bad mental health, and to de-stigmatise it. If you make them think that academia is the only answer, they will withdraw.
“We provide them with time to reflect and chill out. We don’t call it ‘mindfulness’ but we spend time talking and thinking about things. The idea of mindfulness actually lends itself well to a Jewish school setting, as we have time in place for prayer. During this time, we expect them to be quiet and think about what is meaningful to them.”
Marc Shoffren, headteacher of Alma Primary School in Enfield, is another educator keen to stress the importance of a pupil’s emotional wellbeing: “As a school, we have a responsibility to help children not just be academically successful, but also humanly successful — to be able to cope with the stresses and strains of life as much as we can.” According to Mr Shoffren, young pupils at Alma are encouraged to “step back and reflect on the world” and are also taught by teachers whose “modelling techniques” show them how to respond to stress in an emotionally literate and calm manner.
The bottom line, it seems, is that mental health is finally being paid the attention it deserves and, whether through official means — putting meditation explicitly on the curriculum — or by unofficially helping students take time out of their busy days to take a breather, schools are realigning their priorities.
For Susan Garcia, this is a welcome shift in focus. Over the past 10 years, Jami’s education co-ordinator has worked with Jewish and other schools to raise mental health awareness. She currently visits JFS, Hasmonean High, Yavneh College, JCoSS and Immanuel College, working with almost 1,000 pupils a year and presenting seminars to help them cope with the pressures of exams and university applications. Past sufferers accompany her and share their stories to show those who are struggling that they are not alone.
“It doesn’t matter what age or faith you are, mental illness can strike you and it can be the most debilitating illness,” Ms Garcia says. “Schools have an amazing role to play in helping pupils, but they face a lot of pressure due to the more difficult times we live in.
“There is more divorce, there are more reasons why children will experience traumatic events. The effect of what goes on at home, which parents may sometimes hide, means that a child will act out at school.
“It’s about reaching out to the silent voice, to the person who finds it difficult to talk, and showing them they are not alone. The earlier we give young people a pathway, the better. They should know that it’s OK to not be OK.”
And while mindfulness meditation is secular, having first been brought to the West 30 years ago by the American scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn as a means of stress prevention, it does fit comfortably within a Jewish school’s framework. Just ask Samuel Rubin, businessman and lecturer at the London School of Jewish Studies, who received his semichah two years ago. This month, he is running the four-week “Mindfulness and Judaism” course, which explores the inherent compatibility between the two.
“I wanted to focus on the growing popularity of mindfulness, and show how deeply embedded it is within our own tradition,” he says. “The more we focus on our insides and reconnect with ourselves, the more we can reconnect with the divine.
“I have been practising mindfulness for 20 years, and there are many examples of overlap with Judaism. For example, the berachah, the blessing we say before we eat, was instituted by rabbis as a way for us to stop for a minute during our busy lives and just be mindful of what we’re about to do.”
Mr Rubin stresses it is “an extremely important practice to be introduced in schools. Just having the opportunity to stop and pause, even for five minutes a day, has been shown to have an enormous impact on a child’s work performance, on anxiety levels, on their general focus and concentration.”
Importantly, he adds, by making mindfulness a more mainstream activity, there will be a significant shift in society’s perception of mental illness. “It breaks taboos,” he says. “There is now much more understanding about mental issues, and the need to create a framework to deal with them. But it should be preventative, not reactive.
“I feel there is a little revolution going on, which doesn’t just look at intellectual achievement, but provides a much more holistic way of life. People often associate mindfulness with ‘zoning out’, but it is actually about ‘zoning in’.”
And with Parliament and educators now zoning in on mental health, it seems we might all soon have the time and space to be a bit more mindful.
Read one schoolgirl's personal account of mental illness and recovery
