Just Another Sign Of Toxic Schooling

From the NY Times:

Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.

Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.

The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to compulsive engagement with social media. Anxiety has always played a role in the developmental drama of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so intense and overwhelming that they are seeking professional counseling.

As students finish a college year during which these cases continued to spike, the consensus among therapists is that treating anxiety has become an enormous challenge for campus mental health centers.

And guess where all that anxiety starts?

Anxiety has become emblematic of the current generation of college students, said Dan Jones, the director of counseling and psychological services at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

Because of escalating pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress. Accustomed to extreme parental oversight, many seem unable to steer themselves. And with parents so accessible, students have had less incentive to develop life skills.

“A lot are coming to school who don’t have the resilience of previous generations,” Dr. Jones said. “They can’t tolerate discomfort or having to struggle. A primary symptom is worrying, and they don’t have the ability to soothe themselves.”

Oh - and guess what exacerbates the problem?

Social media is a gnawing, roiling constant. As students see posts about everyone else’s fabulous experiences, the inevitable comparisons erode their self-esteem. The popular term is “FOMO” — fear of missing out.

You know what would be a great way to solve this growing problem?

Ratcheting up the level of anxiety at school with some new "tough" standards and new "tough" tests tied to those estandards.

You know what would be even better?

Force teachers to use rubrics for every assignment so that students always know what the expectations are and they never ever have to live with any uncertainty.

And you know what would make for the hat trick?

Stick the kids in front of computers all day for some "personalized learning" so that their interactions with their fellow human beings, both peers and adults, are as minimal as possible.

Oy.

Education reform, helicopter parenting and technology - wrecking an entire generation.

The Lesson I Want To Take From Robin Williams' Death

The nation is in shock over the news that Robin Williams killed himself yesterday.

You can see it on the TV, in the newspapers, on social media - the coverage of Williams' death is everywhere this morning and the recurring pattern in that coverage is shock that Williams would take his own life.

But I'm not in shock over the news of Williams' death.

The darkness that lived inside Robin Williams that ultimately led him to hang himself yesterday was evident in his stand-up comedy, his movie performances, his TV talk show appearances.

As someone who comes from a family that suffers from all three diseases Robin Williams suffered from - depression, addiction and alcoholism - I know the darkness that lives within and the struggle to keep the lights on and the sun shining in.

The good news about those struggles is that they often help people to lead extraordinary lives.

I can't psychoanalyze Robin Williams from afar - I know nothing about his life as a child, his growing up, the experiences and physiology that led to his suffering from depression and becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol at different points in his life.

But I can say that those experiences that brought about the darkness and the sadness in him also brought about the comedic talent and skill he shared with us during his life, the mania he displayed on stage that led to his comic heights, the pathos he hit in many of his better film roles that touched film-goers the world over.

Without the darkness and sadness, Robin Williams never would have been the "Robin Williams" we knew.

By all accounts,Williams was a decent man as well, a generous man, a nice man who treated people with respect - those character traits also came in part from whatever experiences Williams had that brought about the darkness and sadness inside him.

And of course the darkness and sadness led to his cocaine addiction and alcoholism, two of the more destructive ways humans can try and numb soul pain and heartache.

Williams was said to have been sober for many years after kicking his cocaine habit early in his career and he used those experiences as material for his stand-up (most notably in Robin Williams at the Met.)

He relapsed in the late 2000's, began drinking again, then entered rehab and got clean again.

He used these experiences as comic material in Weapons of Self-Destruction and seemed, from the outside at least, to have a handle on the darkness and sadness.

The Guardian obituary has this:

In a Guardian interview in 2010, he spoke about a relapse into alcoholism, his rehabilitation and his open-heart surgery.

Asked if he felt happier, Williams replied: “I think so. And not afraid to be unhappy. That’s OK too. And then you can be like, all is good. And that is the thing, that is the gift.”

Last month news came that Williams had entered another rehab, this time for "sobriety maintenance":

Robin Williams is at a rehab facility again ...but his people tell TMZ it's NOT because he fell off the wagon.

Williams is at Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center near Lindstrom, Minnesota.

Robin is in a part of the facility called The Lodge -- there are lots of fancy descriptions, but it's essentially a program to maintain long-term sobriety.

We're told Robin will be staying for several weeks.

I saw that story and remarked at the time to my wife that it wasn't a good sign that Williams was entering a rehab again, even if it was described as a program to help people in recovery "maintain long-term sobriety."

I sent out a little message to the universe - Gee, I hope Robin Williams is all right - then went on with my own life.

But when news came last night that Williams had killed himself, after the initial "O My God!" reaction, I realized that part of me wasn't surprised at all.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are life-long soul sicknesses, they do not go away no matter how successful a person is, no matter how many years somebody has in recovery, and depression is a mental illness that often remains life-long as well - health can be maintained but one must always be vigilant and even then, well, you never know.

Williams covered this himself in an interview with The Guardian in 2010

Williams used to be a big-drinking cocaine addict, but quit both before the birth of his eldest son in 1983, and stayed sober for 20 years. On location in Alaska in 2003, however, he started drinking again. He brings this up himself, and the minute he does he becomes more engaged.

"I was in a small town where it's not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought: drinking. I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help. Because I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of working so much, and going fuck, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world." What did he feel like when he had his first drink? "You feel warm and kind of wonderful. And then the next thing you know, it's a problem, and you're isolated."

Some have suggested it was Reeve's death that turned him back to drink. "No," he says quietly, "it's more selfish than that. It's just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn't." What was he afraid of? "Everything. It's just a general all-round arggghhh. It's fearfulness and anxiety."

He didn't take up cocaine again, because "I knew that would kill me". I'd have thought it would be a case of in for a penny – "In for a gram?" he smiles. "No. Cocaine – paranoid and impotent, what fun. There was no bit of me thinking, ooh, let's go back to that. Useless conversations until midnight, waking up at dawn feeling like a vampire on a day pass. No."

It only took a week of drinking before he knew he was in trouble, though. "For that first week you lie to yourself, and tell yourself you can stop, and then your body kicks back and says, no, stop later. And then it took about three years, and finally you do stop."

It wasn't, he says, fun while it lasted, but three years sounds like a long time not to be having fun. "That's right. Most of the time you just realise you've started to do embarrassing things." He recalls drinking at a charity auction hosted by Sharon Stone at Cannes: "And I realised I was pretty baked, and I look out and I see all of a sudden a wall of paparazzi. And I go, 'Oh well, I guess it's out now'."

In the end it was a family intervention that put him into residential rehab. I wonder if he was "Robin Williams" in rehab, and he agrees. "Yeah, you start off initially riffing, and kind of being real funny. But the weird thing is, how can you do a comic turn without betraying the precepts of group therapy? Eventually you shed it."

Williams still attends AA meetings at least once a week – "Have to. It's good to go" – and I suspect this accounts for a fair bit of his Zen solemnity. At times it verges on sentimental: he asks if I have children, and when I tell him I have a baby son he nods gravely, as if I've just shared. "Congrats. Good luck. It's a pretty wonderful thing." But it may well be down to the open-heart surgery he underwent early last year, when surgeons replaced his aortic valve with one from a pig.

"Oh, God, you find yourself getting emotional. It breaks through your barrier, you've literally cracked the armour. And you've got no choice, it literally breaks you open. And you feel really mortal." Does the intimation of mortality live with him still? "Totally." Is it a blessing? "Totally."

He takes everything, he says, more slowly now. His second marriage, to a film producer, ended in 2008 – largely because of his drinking, even though by then he was sober. "You know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that's hard to recover from. You can say, 'I forgive you' and all that stuff, but it's not the same as recovering from it. It's not coming back."

Williams gets at the crux of alcoholism and addiction here:

"It's just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn't." What was he afraid of? "Everything. It's just a general all-round arggghhh. It's fearfulness and anxiety."

I've already seen pieces this morning calling for more drug research to find new and better drugs to help people suffering from mental illness and depression to recover but the truth is, often at the bottom of all of that is FEAR and I'm not sure medicating that fear with drugs - even those prescribed by a doctor - really gets to the root of the issue.

Listen, I'm not a doctor, I know that some people have chemical imbalances that need to be adjusted and that doctors, prescribing medication, can do that and help them lead better and healthier lives.

But for many, the kind of depression that leads to alcohol and drug abuse is not a chemical imbalance that can be fixed with more drugs but a soul sickness that needs a more complex treatment than just a drug prescription.

I don't know Robin Williams, don't know his story other than what is in the public record and what he told about himself in interviews and revealed about himself in his stand-up.

But from what I do know about Williams, it doesn't sound like medical treatment alone was enough to heal him of his darkness and sadness.

And that's the point I most want to get across in this post:

We live in a culture that wants the easiest, quickest way to solve problems and we believe that we can ALWAYS solve problems if we just put our shoulders to the wheel and push at something hard enough.

But depression, drug addiction, alcoholism - these are complex things and they cannot be "solved" so easily, perhaps will never be solved so long as we live our mortal lives.

It would be better if we lived in a society and a culture that handled sadness and darkness better, but we do not.

Part of that is because we live in a capitalist society and nothing sells stuff better than sadness and darkness in people.

"Feeling sad? Feeling bad about yourself?"

"Have we got just thing for you!"

"Try this car, house, pill, drink, dress, hair style, diet..."

No, this not a culture that lends itself to letting people be with their darkness and sadness for a bit and understanding just where it's coming from.

Instead we live in a culture and society that has an instantaneous solution for them - for a price, of course.

But this is a false solution.

Williams got at the complexity of this in that 2010 interview:

Asked if he felt happier, Williams replied: “I think so. And not afraid to be unhappy. That’s OK too. And then you can be like, all is good. And that is the thing, that is the gift.”

In the end, that's the message I wish we could take from Williams' suicide.

It's okay to be sad, it's okay to be unhappy, it's okay to be afraid and fearful, these are human feelings and we are simply being human when we feel them.

The key is, to find safe ways to express them, to share them with others, to shine some light on them, to feel them, to accept them and then let them go.

That's the struggle, one which Robin Williams shared with the rest of us very publicly and courageously, with insight, humor and empathy.

And that's the lesson I wish to take from his death.

How Education Reform Is Harming The Health Of Children

There is a horrific story in the NY Post this morning about a rash of suicides involving NYC school children over the last seven weeks:

The city’s public schools are in the grip of a suicide epidemic.

Ten students have taken their own lives in the past seven weeks, according to remarks made Saturday by Chancellor Carmen Fariña.

“As chancellor, I’ve been on the job seven weeks, and there have already been 10 reported suicides. We cannot allow those,” she told 250 new principals at Stuyvesant HS during a private meeting.

“I get those e-mails all the time. And it makes me heartsick.”

The tragic statistic — which amounts to more than one suicide per week — has not been released publicly. The Post obtained a recording of Fariña’s address.

None of the suicides occurred on school property, Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said later Saturday. She could not immediately provide the ages or schools of the children.

Chancellor Farina is responding to this epidemic of suicides:

In her remarks, Fariña implored principals to identify lonely and troubled kids. She related how, as a principal, she’d single out such students for Principal for a Day activities, taking them on her Friday rounds and giving them individual encouragement.

“The DOE is taking this very seriously and has provided information recently to principals and networks to help prepare and support school communities for these traumatic times, in addition to training provided each school year,” Feinberg said.

A spokeswoman for the city’s principals union said the outbreak was a shock to her.

“I’m surprised,” said Chiara Coletti, of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators. “If I heard of one or two in the last couple of years, that would be a lot. [Ten] sounds like a lot to me.”

City Health Department stats show youth suicides are rising, with suicide the third leading cause of death for New Yorkers ages 15 to 24. In 2010, 58 people in that age group took their lives. In 2011, the toll was up to 64, and in 2012 it reached 66.

The stresses on children these days have hit pressure cooker levels.

Many NYC school children come from families still struggling mightily with the effects of the recession and the economy and all the problems that come with that struggle.

It's a dog eat dog economy out there, with many people being tossed by the wayside and left there for good.

When children come to school, there is no change from the dog eat dog world - it's all Common Core rigor and assessments and argumentative writing and the like all the day long, with children being told over and over that in order to be "college and career ready" they must get their test scores as high as they can go.

The message at school in the Era Of Education Reform is "You Are Your Data Points" - in some cases, this is the subtle message, but when kids have their test scores placed on data walls in the classrooms or school hallways, it's as overt a message as can be.

In the best of times, children can be mean to each other, but you add the pressure cooker stresses of a bad economy with high stakes schooling and you can bet half a dozen foreclosed mortgages that children are going to act out in response.

This means more instances of bullying, cyber bullying, and fighting when they're acting out against each other.

It means more problems with alcohol or drug use, eating disorders, cutting (physical harm) when they're acting out on themselves.

Many children are starving from a lack of physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment and one of  the very places where they should be getting that nourishment - school - has turned into a toxic environment of rote Common Core learning and high stakes assessment for students, teachers and the school itself.

And don't kid yourself about how much damage education reform is doing to children - when they no longer do art in art class or no longer do physical activity in gym because school administrations are enforcing "Common Core rigor" in those classes and kids are spending the time reading informational texts and writing argumentative essays even in art and gym class, there is damage being done.

In English class, there is no more text-to-self writing or discussion.  The NYSED ELA modules do not allow for any of that sort of learning - everything is rote text-to-text learning, rote close reading exercises, rote assessments after every lesson.

Children are expressing despair over the direction schools have gone in the past few years (with Internet memes of children crying over their Common Core homework making the rounds all the time), but there is little that school staff can do to mitigate the problems.

Many counselors no longer have time to counsel students on anything except academics and grades.  Many teachers no longer have time to spend talking with children outside of class because of the extra compliance work associated with Governor Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system. With all the extra meetings, obsessive lesson planning, curriculum mapping, focus groups, professional learning community meetings, Common Core professional development and artifact collecting, there is no time to just talk to kids and find out what's going on with them.

APPR has done damage beyond the taking of time from teachers that could be spent working with students - it has added more testing and more high stakes to the school year, with added performance assessments coming in fall and spring and the stresses of those assessments falling onto students as they know if they don't do well, their teachers might get fired by the "student lobbyist" in Albany.

So given all of this insanity going on these days, it is not a surprise to me that more and more children are suffering from depression and a lack of physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment.

It would be nice to say that Chancellor Farina's directive that administrators scrutinize students in their schools in order to catch those who are falling prey to depression and despair, but the truth is, there are so many that I have seen over the past few years that I'm not sure how principals, teachers and counselors address the epidemic given how poisoned the school system is with high stakes so-called rigor and reform.

Until the insanity of the high stakes around testing is ended, until the rote learning of the Common Core is replaced with individual-centered learning that allows for personal growth, until the obsession with argumentative writing and close reading of complex texts is replaced with a broad arts, humanities and science curriculum that allows for children to express themselves in many different ways, the despair and depression that is now rife in the school system is not going to end.

There isn't much educators can do about the economy at large that causes stress on children.

But there is something we can do about the education reforms that are harming millions of children around this state and a million+ in this city.

Let us take back our education system from the emotionally-stunted misanthropic education reformers who tell us that no one gives a shit what children think and feel and return it to people who know that children are whole beings who must be nourished physically, emotionally and spiritually with a rich, broad, diverse curriculum in a school environment that is welcoming and nurturing.