Serious mental health issues of teachers
There is a high percentage of teachers in the world diagnosed with mental health issues.
If you don’t believe me, you just need to google and you would be surprised to find high percentage of mental health patients who are teachers.
I had my personal experience of a beginning teacher who was constantly absent from school weekly.
I also heard that she even hid herself under the teacher’s table once.
Later on, we discovered and found out that this teacher was suffering from depression and she eventually quit teaching.
She returned to her accounting job where she is doing fine even up till today.
In this short article, I am just going to discuss about some of personal opinion on the possible causes of mental health in teachers.
You are free to give your opinions as comments after reading my article.
Dream job vs Reality of teaching
Before entering teaching, most of us expected to just simply teach and nothing else.
We may have imagined how we can be the dream teacher who can easily have a wonderful time with our pupils.
The fact is that we don’t just teach but we do many other stuffs too.
As teachers, we can be put in charge of certain events in the school and there are also lots of administrative work that we need to complete.
Most teachers would also be in charge some sports or societies like soccer, basketball, poetry club, chess club etc.
They would also need to bring pupils for competitions that may not necessary during school hours.
In my local school, most teachers would need to set at least 2 sets of assessment papers yearly and these papers would need to be screen through and redo when questions are not acceptable.
It is also a time-consuming process.
The fact is that there are plenty of deadlines for different tasks to fulfil beside marking our pupils’ work.
The burden of all these tasks resulted in mental health issues when teachers are not able to handle the stress of work.
Students
It was beyond our imagination that pupils were so hard to handle nowadays.
They would even confront a teacher when they disagreed.
They can even get the support of their parents and make complaints to the Principals or even the ministry of education.
Managing a class of extremely diverse group of 21st century pupils may not be an easy task.
It takes a lot of good classroom management skills.
Respect would need to be gained and it does not come naturally to teachers.
With the influence of social medial and internet, our pupils may know things that we do not know.
They may also have certain behaviours that they learnt from internet.
It can be extremely stressful for a beginning teacher to handle the new generation of pupils.
This results in low morale of teachers leading to great discouragement.
Lack of sleep (Sleep disorder)
On an average, I sleep about 4 to 5 hours daily.
It is not really healthy and I am not a good role model of healthy sleep.
With the lack of sleep, many teachers returned to school tired and drained daily with all the things to complete.
This repeated cycle of trying to complete school work resulting in lack of sleep has been happening all over the world.
Without good sleep, some teachers may even start to make mistakes in marking and health issues start to appear resulting in regular medical leave.
Teachers who are unable to cope with long term lack of sleep can result many emotion issues like excessive anger.
Family life
With the high demand in the job, many teachers may have neglected their family members.
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This may have caused family issues like their own children not able to behave well in school.
They may also have argument with their spouse as a result of lacking the time to spend and communicate.
I am definitely a guilty one.
With all the different stresses of being a teacher, teachers can fall easily into mental health issues.
In conclusion
Be aware of your own emotion and mental state.
You know you are suffering many issues like what I have shared, it would be good for you to talk to someone like those seniors that you can trust within the school.
Seek professional help early so that you can avoid falling into serious mental health issues.
This is the end of my short article and I hope it is able to help you in some ways.
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.
Being a teacher has gotten increasingly hard over the course of the most recent years for a couple reasons, but I can only cover reasons that I am familiar with from my life here in Germany.
Being a teacher is neither as safe nor as well paid in many cases as it used to be. Every now and then, the education system attempts some stunts that usually end up being carried on the backs of teachers. And as you said in your post, there is a lot more pressure coming from the parents. A teacher and his values and actions aren't as precious as they once were.
But the whole thing can be turned the other way around.
A lot of people want to become teachers not because of shaping the future of young humans or the joy of education but because the imagine that it comes with all the percs. They end up being disappointed and depressed.
@paparodin Thank you for your reflective comment. It is true that disappointment and depression can come when the reality does not fit what they have imagined how teaching career is like.
Absolutely.
It holds especially true for jobs like being a teacher because there is a long road of learning and studying between you being optimistic and ending up disappointed eventually.
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I have many friends who are teachers in Singapore and they often complains of stress and burnouts. I think teaching in Singapore is not easy at all, yet many think that it's an easy job.
The generation of pampered children with their unreasonable parents made it worse.
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Thanks for your comment! It is true that the children are very pampered. There is also a fact that the younger teachers are from a different generation as well. There used to be strawberry generation. I invented my own label of cotton candy generation as they melt down when face with some heat from work easily regardless of the type of job they take. They have lower level of stress tolerance.
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Mental health is such a big issue these days and we are only scratching the surface of some of the issues people are dealing with. Teaching is a very stressful job and teachers deal with a multitude of issues with students, parents and the school system. It is important to recognize these problems and be proactive about treatment
Being proactive about treatment is really important so that the problem does not accelerate into greater growth with strong root that would be harder to remove later on.
@fun2learn nowdays it is not easy to teach, children are having a bad behaviour and are demanding a lot from people around them, and teachers get involucrated, parents must pay attention to this
Teaching is more demanding as compared when we first started for sure.
This is why education needs revision as a whole structure. The current environment is not fit for both teachers and students.
I think that this is one of the main reasons why teachers abandon their careers and students lose interest.
@edave Thanks for your suggestion for a revision in the education structure.
Hello! Certainly, you know that initially the habits have an impact on mental health, high stress indexes can trigger traits of some disorder until finished instaling. Mental health is important in all areas, the revision of it. But mainly because those who do everything perfect can be potential psychopaths, so this is very important. Regards!
@rosmilage Thanks for coming by to read my article. Having high stress can trigger mental disorder. That is why your article https://steemit.com/mspsteem/@rosmilage/when-to-attend-the-psychologist does provide a good reference for those at risk to get help!
It is true that children are very spoiled. It is also a fact that younger teachers are from a different generation too, I really hope that the whole global education system will change to support their teachers more. I think this is one of the main reasons why teachers abandon their careers and students they lose interest Mental health is important in all areas, reviewing the same regards @fun2learn
Thank your for your visit and comment!
I think the problem you're addressing is very important, and it's easily overlooked, or worse, it's not taken seriously
Thank you for your visit and comment!