Teaching children about mental health seems like a no-brainer, but remarkably, most American schools aren’t required to address it—until now. Effective July 1, public schools in both New York and Virginia have added mental health to the long list of things that all students should learn.
The New York mandate, written way back in 2015 and signed into law in October 2016, implements mental health education at all grade levels; the Virginia law, passed in April, adds mental health education to freshman and sophomore health classes.
While neither state adds specific curriculum requirements, both require mental health to be covered within health classes. It’s hard to believe anyone could possibly vote “nay” on such a bill, but if somebody was going to, it’s no surprise that in New York, all ten opposition votes came from Republicans, including one who died by suicide just a few months after the vote. Meanwhile,Old Dominion State legislators unanimously and swiftly embraced the concept.
Rationale for the change in requirements might seem obvious to those who embrace mental health as a key component of overall health, but until Sunday, exactly zero states required mental health education in their schools, and at this moment, 48 still don’t. That can be changed, though!
First, let’s consider what little opposition New York did face as they fought for bipartisan passage of the bill. With that knowledge in hand, other districts and states might follow suit—including yours.
In New York, it took seven years before the state legislature was able to prioritize what, in the end, was a nominal change to policy. First brought up by a mental health nonprofit in 2011, the bill wasn’t sponsored by longtime Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan until 2014. The relatively mild directive changes little to existing health education protocols, stating that health educators "must recognize the multiple dimensions of health and include the relationship of physical and mental health" in their lessons.
Again, this seems like a shoo-in. We know that mental health is important, and can impact physical health. We know that mental illness is real. We know that mental illness can drive sufferers to self-medicate, which is extra frightening as we slip deeper into the opioid crisis. We know that mental illness is something we need to talk about, but it’s so stigmatized, we rarely do. And because we don’t talk about it, mental illness remains fraught with stigma.
We know that 1 in 5 teens face a mental health struggle in any given year; out of all diagnosed mental illness, we also know that half of mental illnesses begin by age 14. So what reasons could possibly justify ignoring mental health in our vulnerable youth?
Conservative think tanks, of course, found reasons. The John Locke Foundation turned it into an issue of school choice. The Manhattan Institute framed mental health education as a slippery slope to indoctrination, wherein the act of talking about mental illness will actually create mental illness, so therefore we must never speak of it.
Thankfully, these folks in their tinfoil hats are the minority; once introduced, widespread opposition to the New York bill was hard to find, and it was mostly limited to publications like The Heartland and the sort of websites that are prone to use the word “sheeple.” With just ten votes against, the bill sailed through the New York state assembly, and was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo in late 2016.
Virginia's mental health education law, on the other hand, was the brainchild of three high school students deeply affected by mental illness. After meeting at a summer leadership institute in 2017, the students decided to make mental health education their mission. Their 32-page piece of legislation found a friend first in state senator Creigh Deeds—a Democrat stabbed by his own son, who was turned away from emergency mental health services before dying by suicide—and state house representative Robert B. Bell, the students’ local Republican.
“When young people are at that age when there’s a lot of bullying, when they get it and they understand, I want to encourage that,” Deeds said. “We focus so much on the physical health, we forget the brain is part of the body, too.”
Despite token opposition to an early draft, the bill breezed through both sides of Virginia’s state legislature, and Governor Ralph Northam signed it into law in March.
Now that New York and Virginia have opened the door, it’s time to get more laws like these on the books. One could follow the Virginia teens’ approach, and start at the school level, then the district level, find a sympathetic politician, and push it all the way to the statehouse, or one could go straight to the top with the help of existing mental health advocates, like New York did. Other approaches surely exist; what’s most exciting here is that now, two precedents exist and will be tested this fall.
Down-ticket races matter, and mental health education is just one example of how votes for school board members, school superintendents, and state representatives can make a difference. U.S. Education Secretary and Amway heiress Betsy DeVos has made it clear that she isn’t going to make mental health a federal education priority, but there is so much that can done at the local and state level.