Two Stars and a Wish #10: Mental health interventions; censoring science, and research on exclusions
Two great links and one I wish was better
Welcome to those who normally read my posts at my old blogging site. Posts will now appear first here on Substack. Please take the time to subscribe, and consider committing to a paid subscription that will begin later this month and allow you to access extra content.
Here I continue my series of articles that share three items I found on the internet; two of which are good, and one which could be improved.
A guest essay in the New York Times arguing that mental health interventions in schools may be harmful
This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers
For the last 8 years, vague talk of a mental health crisis in schools has been widespread. In practice, this has led to blind faith in initiatives and interventions to address mental health that are not evidence-based. This American newspaper article describes several efforts to address youth mental health that were ineffective or actually made matters worse. It discusses the reasons why that might be the case and points out how a focus on mental health might be bad for mental health. A particularly salient point is the following:
...by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling.
Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.
This is not the only suggestion made to explain the harm caused by well-intentioned attempts to address mental health in schools, and the whole essay is worth a read.
An article about who censors science
Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
This journal article looks at how censorship works in science and, in particular, the extent to which scientists are responsible for keeping controversial material out of print. The most worrying aspect of this is the description of survey responses showing that many scientists are more than willing to see fellow scientists discriminated against for producing unpopular findings. The article also suggests changes that could be made to academic publishing to expose the influence of censorship. Anyone reading education research knows how ideological bias shapes almost everything. It is worrying that this could be happening in more reputable disciplines too.
A terrible research article on exclusions
I fear the "A Wish" slot on these blogs could be filled indefinitely with dodgy research on exclusions. This one, however, deserves its place for the number of errors in the first two sentences of the introduction. Those two sentences are:
The rate of fixed term and permanent school exclusions in the UK has been rising since 2012/13 (Timpson, 2019). In 2021/22 the rate of permanent exclusions in the UK was 0.1%, and the rate of fixed term exclusions (which are typically five school days, but can be up to 45 school days) was 6.91% (Department for Education, 2023).
A few problems here:
There is no "UK" rate of exclusions, education is devolved and the Department for Education only has responsibility for England. In fact, the word "exclusion" doesn't even have the same meaning in the different nations of the UK.
The rate of permanent exclusions (in England) has not been “rising since 2012/13”. It fell in three of the last four years of figures.
The exclusion rate in the link is 0.08% not 0.1%. (And, no, that is not an acceptable way to round).
"Fixed term exclusions" are now called "suspensions" (and this is what it says in the link). Although this has generally been rising, suspensions fell for one year during the pandemic.
While there are always some curious cases in the figures (including sometimes suspensions that go beyond the legal maximum), the 45-day figure is the maximum number of days in total that a child can be suspended for during an academic year. It is not a suggested length for a single suspension.
Suspensions are not typically 5 days. 89.6% of suspensions are for 4 days or fewer. 9.1% are for 5 days and only 1.3% are for longer than 5 days. Figures here.
That's a pretty spectacular tally of errors and omissions in just two sentences. That's not to suggest that the rest of the article is any better. It confuses correlation and causation and promotes a privately owned "neurodisability" screener. However, by the time I had gone through the first two sentences I gave up listing the mistakes. This is a preprint, rather than a final publication, but it should have gone through peer review. How so many basic errors of fact can go unnoticed is beyond me.
Thanks to Gwen for the graphics.