Mental Health Test for our children? My Letter to the Star Editor

Kudos on mental health test, but...

Mental Health Test for our children? My Letter to the Star Editor

I would like to give the thumbs up to the health and education ministry initiative to launch the pilot project in four secondary schools to address mental health issues. But I would like to question the use of terms like 'mental health test' as it is noted to be a sensitive issue. I fear that such terms would be largely misunderstood by the general population especially students, parents and even teachers. I can imagine students who fail the 'mental health test' would be mock by fellow student as 'mental' as the term is used loosely in normal English language to denote in derogatory terms of people with abnormal behaviour. Parents will not want their children to be labelled with such a stigma and teachers may need to be taught how to help rather than isolate such 'emotionally challenged people'. Yes, that would be a more appropriate term to apply. Instead of 'mental health test' why not 'emotional health test' after all there is a blurred distinction that diagnose one as suffering from acute emotional stress and another from mental diseases. We will be able to win over the general public to this pilot project if we promote and 'reframe' it in a less threatening way. I have no doubt 'mental health evaluation' is medically correct term but is it socially and politically correct? Even the DSM used to diagnose mental disorder takes pain to be correct, "A common misconception is that a classification of mental disorders classifies people, when actually what are being classified are disorders that people have. For this reason, the text of DSM-IV (as did the text of DSM-III-R) avoids the use of such expressions as "a schizophrenic" or "an alcoholic" and instead uses the more accurate, but admittedly more cumbersome, "an individual with Schizophrenia" or "an individual with Alcohol Dependence." 

Another misconception to correct is that the actual issue is not the environment but the inability of the general population to deal with negative emotions. As Dr Abdul Kadir said 'the project was a move in the right direction because puberty period could be challenging for secondary school students who might face emotional issuesrelated to studies, peer and parental pressures and unsafe neighbourhoods. '  All of us face these stressful environmental but not all of us suffer from emotionally disorder as a consequence of these. This is because many are not able to deal with and process negative emotions properly. Aside from arguments of predisposition and genetics let us consider emotional management. There is a need to teach students how to deal with their emotions. It is strange that we all process hundreds of emotions daily yet there is no course or subject that helps us do what is a daily necessity. Does it come naturally to everyone? Statistic show otherwise, Malaysian Psychiatric Association article on anxiety reports, "Anxiety disorder is very common. A rough estimate is that all the anxiety disorders together may affect up to 25% to 30% of the population".  If we can process our emotions properly it would not deteriorate to acute emotional stress and later to disorders like anxiety disorders, panic attacks, depression and even mental illness. In other words why don't we teach our kids to deal with their emotions at an early age? The results can be emotionally balance children who graduate to become emotionally balanced adults. If we have moral education why not have 'emotional intelligence' as part of it. Today we have cognitive therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy and other sub-modalities in the psychotherapy world like NLP and EFT amongst others that can be integrated and simplified for secondary students. I am sure we will be churning out modal students of great humanistic potentials with this subject of 'emotional intelligence'!

Isaac Lim

Member of Malaysian Psychotherapy Association

www.eftwonder.com