Intersectionality, interdisciplinarity and mental health in education

Concerns about young people and mental ill health have grown since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020 (Creswell et al., 2021; Gomes et al., 2021; Ho et al., 2020). The rise of screen contact hours and the proliferation of social media platforms too has fueled an increase in online bullying and cyber-crime amongst youth, resulting in unprecedented mental health concerns (Khong et al., 2020; Kwan et al., 2020; McLaughlin et al., 2020; Sohn et al., 2019). For educators and education researchers, these concerns were already acute before the pandemic (Caldwell et al., 2019; O’Reilly et al., 2018). The education sector (both compulsory and higher education) has responded by deploying counsellors and making referrals for students suffering from mental ill health to seek “clinical” (professional) treatment from service providers. It is not surprising that this still-dominant approach is normalised as the standard practice, given that mental health provision has traditionally been administered through the fields of psychiatry, social work, counselling and psychology.

As a field of research, mental health continues to be largely the preserve of medical science professionals with the research limited to strategies of intervention and prevention (McGorry et al., 2022; Chanen, 2015). Recent research shows an increase in attention to peer support strategies (Barr et al., 2022; Dillon & Hornstein, 2013) and arts-based interventions (Park et al., 2023; Harris & Holman Jones, 2023, 2020). However, more work is needed to identify and amplify non-medical strategies for support of young people encountering mental health challenges, especially in education research and from student-centered perspectives (Baik et al., 2019).

In response, research in mental health in education is beginning to explore the nexus between intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as a more affordable – and in many cases, more effective – way forward to further respond to the current global health crisis beyond the medical “norms” of diagnosis, treatment and intervention. Others have highlighted the increase in public and educational discourse about mental health and wellbeing amongst young people and students themselves, filling in the “treatment gap” of normalized medical responses to mental health issues (Ojio et al., 2021; Subramaniam, 2020). The education sector is well positioned to contribute to improving responses to mental health challenges of youth, particularly through intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks responding to mental health as a relational and networked phenomenon in both education and research contexts.

This special issue seeks to contribute to these conversations in mental health education with a focus on “intersectionality” and “interdisciplinarity” as a way to expand understandings of and approaches to youth mental ill health through new critical lenses, whether these are drawn from emerging theoretical or methodological frameworks, or through reinvigorating more standard approaches. Its aim is not to provide definitive answers for the causes of or “solutions” to mental ill health; rather, the authors featured in this issue seek to identify its intersections with education and suggest ways in which education as a sector can and should be more proactive, across a range of regions and countries. The articles that follow are organised into themes that reflect the focus on intersectionality and interdisciplinarity including listening to the voices of young people, about mental health, drawing on arts-based approach to advance mental health understandings, the role of the media in challenging an essentialist construction of disability, and challenging the dominance of psy-discourse in schools and universities. The research focus and the contribution of each article to the theme is briefly outlined below.

Listening to the voices of young people about mental health

Drawing on data obtained from a 3-year study, Marnee Shay, Grace Sarra, Denise Proud, Iris-Jean Blow and Fred Cobbo study explores the identity and well-being of Indigenous young people in diverse school settings. The article features the voices of Indigenous youth and argues that “Indigenous young people see culture and identity as essential to their well-being” (p. 4). The article spotlights Indigenous ways of research as an important contribution to this special issue as well as 21st century research overall. Methodologically, instead of using traditional interviews, the study uses yarns (i.e. the Indigenous way of storytelling) and storyboarding to collect interview data. Epistemologically, the article mobilises what the authors call a transdisciplinary approach – an approach that fuses the Western theory of Funds of Identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014) with local Indigenous knowledges represented by a team of diverse Indigenous researchers. The article sheds light on “the perspectives, stories and experience of indigenous young people” and “how schools can continue to consider identity affirming and development work in the pursuit for student wellbeing and engagement in schools” (p. 12), highlighting the intersectionality of race, culture and educational wellbeing.

Roberto McLeay, Darren Powell and Bruce M. Z. Cohen’s article “Young people’s voices on emotions: a narrative inquiry,” also features the voices of young people and their considerations of mental health. The study involves three primary school students from Aotearoa/New Zealand and how they perceive, construct and make sense of their emotions. Using narrative inquiry which involved four visual vignettes as prompts to elicit conversations, the study explored research participants’ experiences and understandings of emotions through storytelling. The study draws on a Foucauldian theoretical framework to examine the narratives that young people use to construct their feelings, finding that “psy-constructions of happiness have become highly significant within the lives of the participants through the acceptance, promotion, and privileging of positivity, self, and expertise discourses in society” (p. 25). In other words, happiness and the way young people understand their emotions is filtered through expert and popularised understandings of the biomedical lens of pys-disciplines. The authors call for critical interdisciplinary work to understand how young people can be supported to understand their emotions, wellbeing and mental health, and the implications such interdisciplinary work can have to enrich interventions, research, practices, polices, and legislation.

Drawing on arts-based approach to advance mental health understandings

Charlene Rajendran’s article introduces a Singaporean play, Off Centre, to examine the complexity of mental illness and how through theatre a dialogic empathy can be cultivated for/withing mental health education. Off-Centre features two young protagonists, Vinod and Saloma, both of who suffer from mental illness. They self-perceive and are perceived by others as being mentally aberrant and “not normal”. Through the experience of the characters, the play raises broader questions of “normalcy” in society and the marginalisation of those labelled as mentally “off centre.” Of note is that the play has been performed twice in Singapore to wide acclaim. It has also been adapted and then adopted as a drama text in the GCE O and N level Literature syllabus. Rajendran argues that theatre is a powerful platform to evoke dialogue and build empathy for people who struggle with various forms of mental illness. Methodologically, the contribution of this piece includes an arts-based approach to provoking a “dialogic empathy” about mental illness. Rajendran draws on Lindsay Cummin’s argument that “empathy as dialogue pursues a more nuanced understanding of what happens and the systems that underpin it, as the willingness to listen to respond to the other is taken seriously” (p.4). Off-Centre invites the audience to participate and interact with the actors on stage by reflecting and examining their beliefs and biases about the mentally unwell. In this way, Rajendran argues, socially engaged theatre then becomes part of critical pedagogy, and an educational strategy toward inclusivity and belonging.

Daniel X. Harris and Stacy Holman Jones’s article also offers creative strategies for addressing mental ill health in young people. The article examines borderline personality disorder (BPD) through a composite case study of “Matthew” using the methodology of a creative ecological approach. The five domains of this approach are policies, processes, products, people/partnerships, and places (or physical environment) (p. 4). The article discusses the methodological benefits of using a creative ecological approach to support and sustain young people living with mental health challenges in schools, taking the focus from the individual onto the collective, the emplaced, and the longer term and over-arching policies and practices that determine all educational and wellbeing procedures. They argue that all health (or ill health) is collectively-constituted and embedded, never individual, and lifelong, extending existing scholarship on BPD which remains focused on individual journeys and traits (Moran et al., 2016). Through the case study analysis, the authors assert that “there is much to be gained by taking a holistic and networked approach to address the urgent need to make schools places where poor mental health not only be ameliorated but also where mental well-being flourishes” (p. 9).

The role of the media in challenging an essentialist construction of disability

Media scholars have established that television plays a crucial role in shaping and educating people’s values and understandings of society and its people in general. In Gary Lam and Hei Ting Wong’s article “How does television represent people who suffer from a neurodivergent disorder?”, the authors put a television documentary called A Wall-less World broadcast in Hong Kong under scrutiny. A Wall-less World is RTHK’s television series production that seeks to promote social inclusivity about disability and educate the public about people who suffer from neurodivergent disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and/or specific learning disorders (SPLD). As a public media institution, RTHK carries the ethical responsibility of disseminating unbiased media content and creating awareness of social issues such as various forms of disability. Lam and Wong offer a critical reading of A Wall-less World by deploying qualitative content analysis as a methodology to surface dominant constructions, ideologies and absences in this media text. Their analysis point out the glaring absence of the lived experience of neurodivergent individuals in the documentary. Thus, they argue that “the challenge is for the media or cultural industry to showcase genuinely diverse (re)presentations of neurodivergent individuals so as to improve misunderstanding of the narrow, rigid, stereotypical image of neurodiversity among the public” (p. 11).

Challenging the dominance of psy-discourse in schools and universities

Three articles in the special issue tackle the dominance of the “psy-discipline” – a collective term for psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies – in mental health scholarship and the uptake in schools and universities. It is common now in schools to deploy counsellors to provide support to students who suffer from any form of mental health issues and distress. Some go to the extent of providing diagnoses to “fix” students through various psy-related practices and knowledge of self- and emotion-related practices.

Julie Allen and Valarie Harwood’s article argues that a more critical engagement of the “damaged self” propagated by the diagnosis of the psy-discipline is way too unilateral in the understanding of mental health. They assert that school practices contribute to a damaged self in education by turning difference into a spectacle of sorts while at the same time psy discourses are circulated as the redemptive solutions. Instead, of this reductive view, Allen and Harwood introduce the idea of the art of selfwork, arguing that it is “one response that can embrace the plurality of life and counter-narratives that can challenge the medicalised view of mental health” (p.10). They define the art of selfwork as a capability approach where the self is an on-going project involved in living the world and its relations with the world, human and non-human. They discuss media personalities such as Thelma Plum (an Indigenous Australian singer) and Malala Yousafzai (a Pakistani activitist for female education) as exemplars of well-known people who enact selfwork in distressing situations. The authors encourage us to move away from “the dominant psy-discourse and to welcome instead the multiple ways in which the self can function and flourish in education” (p. 11).

Turning toward more traditional therapies, Enrique Nino P Leviste’s article critiques the therapeutic turn in education. This “turn” comprises two psy-related disciplines, namely psychotherapy and psychology. Leviste examines each of the disciplines and how both work to form modern subjectivities and self-help movements. He points out that the rise of the “therapeutic turn” has ushered in a range of nebulous vocabularies, practices and discourses from different branches of therapy and psychological ideas and diagnoses. Psychologisation on the other hand works to form, organise, disseminate, and implement truth-claims about person-participants. This has given birth to various from of psy-related practices in educational settings such as emotional education, psychodrama workshop, anger management and direct behavioural training, amongst others. In consequence the therapeutic turn, Leviste argues, is “a neoliberal movement” where autonomous, disciplined and resilient individuals are favoured. Such thinking overlooks wider structural inequities and blankets mental health narrowly to individualised practices that can be corrected by the therapy turn. Leviste argues that intersectional approaches draw critical attention to “a contextualized and nuanced analysis of multiple social forces, social identities and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized” (p. 2). In summary, “the article explores the possibility of reframing how schools conceptualize and approach mental health, emphasizing the need to promote a context-sensitive, structure-conscious and inclusive program that genuinely includes rather than exclude” (p. 11).

Eva Bendix Petersen and Laura Louise Sarauw’s article provides a concrete example of how the psy-discipline has infiltrated higher education in the form of psychometrics used in universities in Denmark. The Danish government has rolled out a new national student survey that “measures” students’ well-being at the place of study. In this policy move, how well universities perform in mental health and well-being are rewarded financially accordingly. Thus, psychometrics are now performance indicators and a new mode of governance for universities. Further, Petersen and Sarrauw’s analysis of the national survey on student well being shows that psychometric measures do not only evaluate but also serve to construct a particular type of “positive student” – based on positive psychology – one who wakes up feeling “fresh and rested”, cheerful and in good spirits”. They argue that this ideal construction of the positive student is problematic and “runs counter to the ministry’s intention of enhancing students mental heal and well-being, which by and by, could be done by widening rather than narrowing the rules of acceptance for how one might and should feel as a student in higher education” (p. 7). The survey, they argue, might unintentionally produce an “unhappy” student and the educational experience as an “unhappy” one.

Tim Corcoran’s theoretical piece “From dialogics to ecologics; when the how is the what”, also challenges the dominance of a psychological approach to mental health in schools. Instead of centring psychology as the only way to understand mental health, Corcoran introduces the prospect of ecologics as a guide for communities committed to responding to mental health concerns in respectful and ethical ways (p. 1). Ecologics disavows a narrow approaches to mental health, such as turning to psychology as the only disciplinary resource. Instead, Corcoran argues that there are other ways of knowing and being in which “intersectionality and interdisciplinary exist transparadigmatically” (p. 5). In other words, there are theoretical benefits that can be drawn from more than one ways of knowing and understanding mental health. As examples, Corcoran considers three prospective disciplines, namely, critical disability theory, critical psychology and indigenous knowledges and their contribution to mental health under the axiom of ecologics. The article concludes with five prospective conditions necessary for ecologics to flourish and these are (i) explicating orientation, (ii) accepting not-knowing, (iii) working transparadigmatically (iv) affirming relationality and (v) respecting unfinalisability.

The last piece in the collection examines a mental health incident that sparked a series of whole-school approach to the management of mental health in schools in Singapore. In an unprecedented case, a 13-year old teenager was killed by a 16-year old teenager in a toilet during school hours. It was an unprovoked incident in which the penetrator bought a weapon online and brought it to school undetected. Characteristic of the Singapore government, crisis management came quickly. Goh and Koh’s article analyses the institutionalising responses to a growing sense of youth mental health crisis in Singapore as the subjectivation of well-being. The Ministry of Education introduced a slew of interventions, which includes deploying more counsellors in schools, enlisting parental support groups, conducting mental health literacy professional development for teachers, and even training students to be vigilantes reporting fellow students with symptoms of depression. Mental Health Literacy, too, quickly receives curriculum attention integrated into the existing Character and Citizenship education. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), Goh and Koh argue that schools have become and turned into “a totalizing system of surveillance” and “heterotopia”. Instead of “producing a totalizing system of surveillance and counselling by everyone caught in the heterotopia of the school, they suggest alternative discourses alongside the subjectification of well-being.

Together, the collection offers readers thematic, theoretical and methodological strategies for rethinking student wellbeing in education contexts. Across a range of different focus areas, and diverse cultural settings, these essays offer a suite of strategies for improving how we see, discuss and act on the needs of youth suffering from mental ill-health in education. At the heart of this special issue, we are concerned with offering strategies that move away from the dominance of a medicalized psychological framework to approaches that are interdisciplinary and intersectional, taking the student-centered perspective and student voices as central.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).