Hyper-awareness of mental health conditions could be harming kids' well-being, researchers said in a May 6 report from The New York Times report.
Researchers at the University of Oxford in the U.K. coined the term "prevalence inflation" to describe an increase in mild or temporary symptoms mislabeled as mental health disorders. The researchers suggest large-scale mental health campaigns in school could contribute to the effect.
Lucy Foulkes, PhD, a Prudence Trust research fellow at Oxford, told The New York Times schools should carefully consider the effects of mental wellness campaigns.
"It's possible that something very well-intended has overshot a bit and needs to be brought back in," she told the news outlet.
Studies in the U.K. and Australia of large-scale efforts in schools found students who participated in mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy training reported worse mental health outcomes, the Times reported.
One explanation for the disconnect, researchers said, was the programs could be teaching students to sit with difficult feelings without providing solutions. Another explanation could be "co-rumination," in which groups of students amplify each other's negative feelings without reaching resolutions.
Though some studies have found mental wellness programs to be ineffective, a meta-analysis of 252 programs in 53 countries found students who participated in mental wellness programs performed better academically, had better social skills and reported lower levels of emotional distress.
The notion that hyper-awareness of mental health awareness is detrimental to young people's well-being is a minority opinion among mental health professionals, The New York Times reported.
Jessica Schleider, PhD, director of the lab for scalable mental health and associate professor of medical social sciences at Evanston, Ill.-based Northwestern University, told the newspaper students are not overdiagnosing themselves with mental health issues.
"In the partnerships that I have, the emphasis is on the kids truly struggling right now who have nothing — we need to help them — more so than a possible risk for a subset of kids who aren't really struggling," she said.
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