Is teaching a mental illness?!

Kinda sorta for real

Alrighty, let’s think about it. Teaching as a career might be among the worst things you can do to your mental and physical health. 

Now you might say, nah it’s just too many A-type perfectionists trying to be perfect all day and then crashing. But if it’s just that then you’d have to plan and arrange things in a way that this type of person would be protected from those traits. If your industry relies on people overworking, and the people drawn to the job have a tendency to overwork and burn out - that’s a controllable and expected thing that can be worked around. But it is not - and so you have an unsafe work environment, culture and level of expectation. 

And that’s been the development and movement within the union actions around all industries. As the number of industrial homicide is on the decline, we turn our focus towards the relatively harder to see issues. Somatic, mental and physical health concerns.

A neat corollary is social work - you know that such a profession will attract givers, people for whom boundaries might be challenging - and knowing when to switch off and divest themselves from others problems. So it’s something that can be planned around - no one should be surprised that these types of people are entering that profession. So training and preparing for managing one’s own mental health and level of boundaries and rule setting is par for the course. Now as we all know, this isn’t really happening, and as with teaching the burn out and attention rates are high. 

But the hidden elements are the ongoing impact of these attrition rates. People move on to new jobs, but they may do so with an ongoing mental health concern or a series of new and damaging habits (drinking, drug-taking and binging of all kinds). 

So as a ‘recovering teacher’, here are some things I’ve noticed; 

• Social difficulties / eyes on a swivel 

I used to joke with my student teacher that before being a teacher I have normal social skills but that teaching trained me out of it. This was funny then but also very true. Eye contact in teaching is a luxury that we know not of. You are ‘running the room’ - you are never fully engaged with one student - you scan rhe room for taking, fights, game playing and so on. You learn to angle your body to face the room and never turn your back on a student - even writing on the board requires a half turn so that you can scan the room. 

Now for a teacher these are things you learn, they’re skills that serve you well. But zooming out of the strange culture of teaching - what I’ve just described is hyper vigilance. And it’s not good for people to do for the majority of their day, perhaps it’s not even good to do at all. 

Then when you think of these same habits in a social setting you have someone whose not fully making eye contact and is constantly scanning the room for threats = VERY Odd behaviour! 

• Friday night crash 

Yeah that’s not really a thing, you can work a full week then have energy for the weekend or even the Friday night drinks common in non-teaching jobs. Rather than a soul destroying crash and two days to heal back to a semblance of health over the weekend. 

• Holiday crash illness

Speaking of the crash, that happens even moreso at the start of every school holidays for teachers - so much so that it’s only the truly rookie teacher who books flights days after the end of a school term. Any one a couple of years in knows you need at least a couple of days to get I’ll and bounce back before beginning your break for real - yeah not a good sign for a sustainable profession! 

• Managing the unmanageable - always prepared for anything 

• Checking your schedule the way in before school

Becoming a competent teacher is accepting chaos and finding OCD style strategies to cope with this fact. Always bringing the same books, markers in the same pocket, etc etc etc (if you don’t have any of these and you’re teaching I’d be shocked). And if you take away these small crutches the unravelling mental state is telling. 

• End of term times / end of year for senior teachers as worst time, seeing all sorts of students at their worst.

When you most need a break, your ‘clients’ are at their absolute worst - and there’s always next year to plan 1 meaning there is never a true end in sight. Oh you’re a senior teacher with some nice classes, what’s that? Oh exams to make and invidulate - enjoy that! 

In short, teachers have: 

“above-average clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and physical concerns were reported, and 17% of respondents met criteria for probable alcohol dependence. Results suggested that maladaptive coping strategies employed by teachers may contribute to their risk of increased psychological distress, and decreased life satisfaction and happiness.” (Stapleton et al., 2020, p.1). 

Yikes! 

If you’re a teacher and any of these points didn’t match your experience I’d love to know! And I think many other teachers might learn from your wisdom and approach - so genuinely do share, I’ll share your ideas around! 

References

Stapleton, P., Garby, S., & Sabot, D. (2020). Psychological distress and coping styles in teachers: A preliminary study. Australian Journal of Education, 64(2), 127-146.

Running Word Count (the second 100,000): 38,927