Invisible Battles in the Classroom: How Teachers Identify and Respond to Silent Mental Health Issues in Indian Youth

Abstract

As teachers we are often the first to notice concerns to student's mental health. Moreover, while counsellors on campus are encouraged, our students often feel comfortable with approaching faculty members, often even more than their family members since they interact with faculty on a day to day basis in class and have often built a rapport with them. This then raises questions about the preparedness of faculty in handling these student mental health concerns. Surely, faculty members aren't meant to replace psychologists and counsellors - but to what extent can one predict teacher response as a consequence of mental health literacy and teacher confidence in handling these concerns - is the purpose of this study. Correlation analysis was done to understand the strength of correlation between these three variables. Then ANOVA was used to understand the percentage of variance explained in Teacher Response with respect to student mental health situations.