Teachers do not diagnose nor prescribe but perhaps just as powerfully, they refer students, parents, and guardians to mental health services when situations seem to call for support beyond the capacity of the school. The informality of teacher referral work may obscure the powerful pseudo-diagnostic effect of mental health referral. Further, the placement of referral as outside of and prior to mental health may problematically portray mental health referral as neutral and not itself a form of mental health system intervention. Referral can take several forms, from confidential parent-teacher meetings to schoolwide mental health promotion campaigns and curricula. School mental health initiatives promoting early detection and referral ensure informal mental health observation is offered within every part of the school community. Through school referral, students and their parents/guardians learn to read emotional and behavioural struggles as symptoms of mental disorder; in contrast, they learn to read mental health system as a benevolent source of individual correction and improvement. Although the mental health system derives from European and American institutions and classification schemes, global mental health discourse helps ensure that students from all backgrounds and regions of the world routinely encounter mental health teachings in Canadian schools. In this paper presentation, I will argue that mental health referrals are themselves interventions.

Author: Jan DeFehr

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2024

• Date of Conference: 23-25 July, 2024
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2024.0043
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-65-5
• Conference Location: Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada