FEATURE: MENTAL HEALTH & WELLBEING


Covid-19: Is resilience the best narrative for mental health in schools right now? T


he government’s Wellbeing for Education Return Covid-19 initiative which is being


rolled-out by local authorities across the UK includes over 40 references to resilience. But are there other messages that children and young people need in the pandemic, in terms of how to be and what to do with their distress? In our final feature this month, Dr Margot Sunderland, Co-Director of Trauma Informed Schools UK, argues that there absolutely are. Firstly, we have to be so careful to say what we


mean by resilience. If not, some children/young people will get the message that not being resilient is bad. This can remove hope for those who are in a lot of emotional pain right now, with the death of a loved one or being ‘locked in’ with a violent or severely depressed parent. Having delivered trauma informed training to


over 20,000 school staff during the pandemic, Trauma Informed Schools UK (TISUK) found that children and young people are increasingly seeking out teachers who are ‘talkable to’ in order to get help with their distress. They say that they don’t feel at all resilient. Instead, they use words like “smashed-up”, “anxious all the time”, “in pieces”, due to the negative impact of Covid- 19 on their lives. This situation is underlined by research, in particular that of The Guardian and The Prince’s Trust, who’ve found that during the pandemic, prescriptions for sleeping pills for under-18s have increased by 30%, over a quarter of young people feel they aren’t coping, 41% have experienced self-loathing and nearly a third are now having panic attacks.1 So, children and young people need to know


that resilience/psychological strength is not something you have or don’t have. It can only be built in a relational context, in other words from having what is known as the protective factor of an emotionally available adult (EAA). For many, this will be an adult at school who is able to really hear their distress, rather than encouraging them to bounce back from adversity. If we don’t make this relational context clear to


children and young people, the worry is that the resilience narrative can all too easily shame. For example, some may understand it like this, “My single parent Dad was made redundant during lockdown which then led to us losing our home and so he turned to drink. This mustn’t be enough to explain my panic attacks. It must be because I’m not resilient enough.” The resilience message could also leave children


and young people thinking that, “My school rates resilience. So, I’d better bottle up my feelings, hide my eating disorder and not speak about my depression.” This is dangerous. Research shows that the constant unrelieved stress from bottling up feelings impacts adversely on the body (immune system, endocrine and autonomic nervous systems). It can increase your chances of premature death by more than 30% and being diagnosed with cancer by 70%. 2 Relevant to this is the work of Emmy Werner,


one of the first scientists to use the term resilience in the 1970s. She studied a cohort of children who grew up in adverse conditions. Two-thirds went on to lead very painful lives. One-third didn’t. But when she studied the resilient people later, she found they had an unusually high level of physical illness!3 In contrast, the wealth of social buffering studies (psychology and neuroscience) shows that just one EAA in the child’s life prevents this awful fall out in terms of physical ill-health in later life. Furthermore, the resilience message of “return to pre-crisis status quickly”,4 flies in the face of trauma recovery research which shows that it cannot be rushed, but happens over time in a relational context with an EAA as described. Moreover, the resilience message could so


easily lead to ‘blocked grief’ - neurologically proven to cause depression.5 Therefore, the message for children/ young people suffering traumatic loss in the pandemic should not be “We’ll help you re-build your resilience”, rather it should be, “We’ll help you feel safe enough with your EAA to cry and cry as much as you need and we’ll be right there for you when you do.” As John Bowlby (founder of attachment) so wisely said all those years ago, ‘It is not possible to grieve without the presence of another.’ Furthermore, if used wrongly, the resilience


narrative can be a failure to imagine into a child’s life circumstances and place the problem with the child/young person rather than with agencies for societal change and government bodies. Who wouldn’t feel depressed, vulnerable and not at all resilient, for example, if they lived the life of 9- year-old Sally? She lives in a high rise flat with a violent mother and depressed father. When the boiler broke down during lockdown there was no money to repair it, so now they sit with their coats on. All three sleep on the floor because they had to rent out the other room to pay for food.


34 www.education-today.co.uk


Mum regularly calls Sally stupid, pathetic, a waste of space. Sally feels hopeless and cries a lot in class. The resilience narrative would be a terrible denial of Sally’s experience and of her suffering.


So what messages should we be giving children in schools about how to be with their distress in the pandemic? With all the provisos above in place, by all means keep the resilience narrative. But we also need another narrative; one that acknowledges profound emotional pain and the child’s need to tell their story and feel really heard and understood in doing so. When suicide is the biggest killer of children and young people under the age of 35, boy, do we need this language for emotional pain in schools. For those who are actively contemplating taking their own lives, the resilience message is at best meaningless and at worst a gross misattunement, fuelling further feelings of alienation from school and from life itself. As part of this narrative for emotional pain, we


need to support school staff to be fluent in many mental state languages including:


A language for longing, grieving and yearning December 2020


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