Emotional Well-being In Education Policy

Emotional well-being in educational policy and practice aims to teach children and adolescents to deal with their emotions on a daily basis. Although you may not know it, more and more children are being diagnosed with all sorts of emotional disorders. Interestingly, about 15% of these cases have something to do with anxiety.

The hectic pace of life, academic demands, parental stress and genetic vulnerability to emotional disturbances are some of the factors that can cause children to develop a mental disorder. From this perspective, there are many treatments that aim to provide a solution.

It was common to undergo some kind of cognitive behavioral treatment for a particular pathology. For example, when it came to childhood depression, psychology had the PEAC Méndez program, or Stark’s ACTION, among the most relevant options.

Currently, however, there is much more interest in tackling various mental disorders transversally. This is because many of these disorders share a common core.

Let us therefore also mention Norton’s transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral therapy or Barlow’s Unified Protocol in this context and for the adult population.

In both programs, the aim is to find factors that are common to different emotional pathologies (anxiety, depression, somatotrophic disorders, etc.), so that the patient can discuss them with his or her therapist, who will provide the most effective and efficient techniques and strategies. to use.

The good news is that this practice is currently extending into the field of child psychology and they are testing programs such as emotional well-being in educational policy and practice.

Characteristics of emotional well-being in educational policy and practice

Jill Ehrenreich, psychologist at the University of Miami and director of the Child and Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Program, has successfully developed an innovative wellness program to treat emotional problems in children: the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents .

Part of the starting point here is that the dividing line between the various disorders that children struggle with is very thin. In fact, as in adults, anxiety and depression are often comorbid disorders.

However, according to a study published online in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Practice , the severity of anxiety and depression decreased significantly in children who received this type of therapy.

The main goal of this intervention is to identify each patient’s weaknesses. Then a plan can be drawn up so that they do not form an insurmountable obstacle in solving problems. That is why the new treatment program is mainly about cognitive techniques, but also about effective behavioral strategies.

The pillars are:

• Education about emotions. They learn to identify and recognize the role they play.
• Dealing with emotions. Teach students the relationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Explain how intervention in one of the three areas affects the others.

• Problem solving ability. Here they use D’Zurilla and Goldfried’s problem-solving techniques on young children.
• Strategies to evaluate situations. This is about knowing how to identify whether a situation is aversive, neutral or positive.
• Parent training. Sometimes children’s problems are due to the attitude of the parents, especially if there is a negative reinforcement. Thus, the leading role played by parents is essential to control this variable.
• Behavioral activation. This is a classic strategy used in the treatment of depression. So the goal here is to increase one’s positive reinforcement in their environment.

Development of the study

The researchers recruited 22 children between the ages of 7 and 12 to participate in the study. Each child had a primary diagnosis of anxiety disorder and a secondary depression problem.

Once a week, the study participants attended the emotional well-being group therapy for a total of 15 weeks. The results indicate that 14 of the 18 children who completed the program no longer met the criteria for anxiety disorder.

In addition, only 20% of the children who had a major depressive disorder before treatment met these criteria even after the program.

One of the most surprising findings was the improvement in comorbid depression and anxiety. Usually depression delays treatment or makes it difficult when it occurs at the same time as other mental disorders.

This is a well-known problem, as most current therapies do not treat multiple emotional problems at once.

The researchers’ hypothesis is based on the results of Peter Norton. This suggested that if they approached the main disorder from a broader perspective, including appropriate strategies for depression, the latter would also improve.

The key, as Norton points out, is to find the root cause that underlies all problems and get away from ‘artificial distinctions’.