A teacher promoted to the head (principal) position, who had previously been jailed for stealing from his school, was also jailed for abusing 13 boys, a girl and an adult at the start of this week.
The BBC has the story here including the story crawl inset and at the bottom of the page from localised sources.
– CBG
I found it interesting because I think the show does a good job of talking to people involved with treating kids and showing what the problem is. Starting with the conversation with a pediatrician, we learn that medical schools don’t effectively train doctors to deal with mental health issues. The risks to children they’ve been taught to deal with are external. These include viruses, broken bones from accidents, stitching cuts, etc. Today, however, the risks to kids have become much more internal. They are harming themselves due to mental health issues at rates we’ve never seen before. Doctors have not been trained to deal with those kinds of risks, and it is made clear that if you’re studying to be a pediatrician, you focus on the external risks because if a kid comes in with an internal risk, you’ll refer them to someone who specializes in mental health.
Of course, there’s a problem with that.
While our attention has been focused on the big news taking place in the UK, down in Australia, political leaders are making calls to add priests, even in confessional, to the list of required reporters of child abuse. The Church, naturally, disagrees and considers this interference with religious practice, since the confessional has always been…
My first thought, obviously, was about the workplace and the culture we have created there that rewards being “always-on” but I think so much of this pressure permeates beyond work. As technology has become commonplace we all live with this pressure and this expectation. Think about it, how many times in a given week are you apologizing to friends and family because you couldn’t get back to them right away?
I do it all the time.
Heck, I’ve gotten text messages while having lunch or dinner with a friend, catching up with someone I haven’t gotten to see much for the last couple of years, and then apologized for doing that and being unavailable. Why? That makes no sense but we live in a culture where being connected to technology all the time also means that we should be responsive all the time. Or at least we feel like we should. Frankly, that’s a lot of pressure.
I think this is interesting. Of course, access to a park or walkable neighborhoods would lead to better mental health outcomes. At least that is what we’d expect. But for some young people, when that park or neighborhood isn’t safe, it might turn into yet another place to be hyperalert and anxious about.Â
