Mental health data is being produced and proliferated globally and schools are increasingly pressured to respond to a perceived youth mental health crisis. It is worth questioning how such data is produced and how it constructs young people's health via western pathological frameworks. This paper is a critical engagement with mental health discourse and its increasing convergence with pressures in and on education settings. I employ the notion of coloniality to think through the implications for the ways youth mental health is represented and what this means for health and physical education in schools. I argue that the way mental health is measured, reported and then taken up as a project in schools is both limited and problematic – and reflects coloniality and colonised ways of thinking. In particular, I interrogate how clinical diagnostic measures (for example anxiety and depression screening tools) are producing truth claims about the status of youth health that are completely distanced from how young people understand their own wellbeing. These create a drive to 'fix' youth mental health. The word 'fix' here is doubled, meaning both to solve and to anchor. Increased monitoring of youth mental health then renders the subjective objectifiable, knowable and fixable, and it potentially distracts from young people's distress. I argue that relying on psychological measures and frameworks to approach youth mental health sets up particular closed and circuitous ways of understanding distress and, at the same time, forces certain educational policy agendas and moves to psychologised approaches to practice.
Katie Fitzpatrick (Thu,) studied this question.