Author: Yara Rouhana, MA Clinical Psychology

Adolescence: The most difficult stage of development

Adolescence is a critical stage of development where significant biological, psychological, and social changes occur in one’s life. It’s also known for its vulnerability to mental health disorders, as it’s estimated that about 50% of mental illness starts at the age of 14 (Paruk & Karim, 2016). Many teenagers exhibiting mental health difficulties go untreated for many reasons, some of them being a lack of mental health literacy and the stigma that still surrounds mental illness (Carta et al., 2015). Ample research evidence shows that raising awareness about mental illness, especially among adolescents, is an urgent matter that needs to be addressed. For this reason, the education sector across the globe is starting to embed mental health services within the school systems.

Mental Health Literacy in School

Schools are ideal for such an endeavor. It’s where children and teenagers spend most of their time, and a place where trained educators can explicitly teach them about mental health as part of a preventive intervention. In fact, studies like Tejada-Gallardo et al. (2020) showed the impact of such interventions on reduction of distress, especially anxiety, and on the improvement of the overall psychological wellbeing in students. In addition, such programs are successful in reducing risk factors associated with emotional and behavioral problems as well as positively impacting students’ academic achievement (Carta et al., 2015). Mindfulness-based interventions (MBI), in particular, have been given much attention in the last decade. A meta-analysis of 24 studies shows promise in terms of effectiveness. Many studies depicted a positive impact of these interventions on students’ cognitive performance, stress and coping mechanisms, and resilience to stress (Zenner et al., 2014). A more recent meta-analysis of MBI’s conducted in schools further highlights its effectiveness in reducing levels of stress, depression, and anxiety among adolescent students, especially when the duration of such interventions lasts long (Dunning et al., 2019).

The UAE context

Due to the alarming increase in mental health difficulties during the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) made student wellbeing a top priority, stressing on the importance of integrating more wellbeing intervention in schools to foster social-emotional health in students (Waters et al., 2021). The pandemic has, in fact, majorly influenced the field of mental health in the UAE, specifically in raising awareness about its importance and breaking the long-standing social stigma surrounding mental illness in the region (Zakzak & Shibl, 2020). Unfortunately, there are significantly high rates of depression and anxiety disorders among UAE adolescents, with 28% of them suffering from anxiety disorder and 17-22% suffering from depression. This is especially the case for girls, not taking account of the increase that occurred post Covid-19 pandemic (Al-Yateem et al., 2020; Shah et al., 2020). Such percentages remain highly unrepresentative as they do not include the many more teenagers suffering in ‘silence’, but rather those who were courageous enough to seek help and more accurately those whose parents were aware enough to ‘listen’. Currently, UAE schools are not all equipped with school counselors specialized in child psychology and the schools that do have a largely unbalanced ratio of counselors to students. Although the UAE is making important advancements in the field, especially in regard to establishing general wellbeing initiatives, it has not particularly targeted students and school staff. This suggests an urgent need for implementing wellbeing interventions in UAE schools, as there is empirical evidence of their effectiveness abroad (Zakzak & Shibl, 2020).