HiPER Consultants.

High Performance, Education & Research Consultancy Specialising in Organisations, Coaching, Talent and People Development.

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

My letter to the President of the Oxford Union.👇

I see Carl Benjamin ⁦@Sargon_of_Akkad⁩ was also stood down from speaking at this debate on British identity.

If these are our future leaders of the country, then we are in trouble. 😬

[Washington Examiner @dcexaminer]

Mental health worsened after gender transitions for youth, major new study finds https://t.co/NLYkpmO0ct

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

Next Sat we are taking THREE HUNDRED kids to Rugby League Ashes match

Eng vs Aus at Wembley!

20 will carry England’s flag on to the pitch in Michaela uniform🥳

So we showed them rugby in the yard.

Mr B against yr 8! He tricks them but vid 2/2👇shows them taking him down😂

[Kathleen Stock @Docstockk]

Who is doing joined up thinking about how schools. universities, therapy culture fosters narrative of withdrawal from life for anxious and depressed young people? When I was teaching at uni, one third of students had mental health diagnosis - a large proportion anxiety/depression - with reasonable adjustments including "don't ask them any questions in class" and a lot of accommodation of absence. There were not enough private rooms for exams, as requested as an adjustment - we had to hire the local football stadium. I tried to raise this issue, arguing that anxiety often responded well to controlled exposure to the source, but was told by managers it was "best practice" to try to make life as non-intimidating as possible for anxious students. If that is representative of our culture's attitude, I am not surprised this cohort feel overwhelmed by life/work/going outside when formative institutions effectively validated this response. There are other careful ways to handle the issue, it is not "cruel" to push back on endless accommodation when the accommodation is perpetuating the problem. This is NOT a comment on the severest kinds of mental health problems - in fact, such is the huge expansion in diagnosis of milder kinds, people who have bipolar (for instance) get lost in the system. It just seems to me that this issue is systemic, and when anxiety and depression in teens and twenties are being treated as disabilities alongside severe physical incapacity, the consequences are bad, both for the first group, and for the second who are being lumped in.
Edited to add, after seeing first comment: you can acknowledge that many young people's problems are structural/economic, and they get a raw deal, whilst still noticing that - particularly in middle-class environments - anxiety and depression are being addressed in counterproductive ways. You can have both.