If you’re one of the two in five newly qualified teachers experiencing mental health problems in Scotland, then being given a free pocket poetry book to assuage your feelings of anxiety and depression may seem laughable. Or tokenistic. Contemptible, even.
But before you knock this idea, the brainchild of the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) and various teaching bodies, including the General Teaching Council Scotland, please hear me out. I’m not a teacher but, having been hospitalised for post-natal anxiety/depression, I’ve experienced first-hand how much more powerful a creative outlet is in managing a mind than popping pills or pouring more wine (believe me, I’ve done the research).
One of the biggest tragedies about mental illness in teaching is that it makes you feel cut off from others and from your purpose in life, and like you’re the only one feeling like you do. And one of the biggest problems with popular ways to deal with these feelings - cigarettes, alcohol, antidepressants, self-harm, over-eating - is that they disconnect you further from yourself by numbing you or providing a temporary, artificial high.
What a creative outlet, like reading poetry, can do is help you face your feelings rather than run from them, reconnect with yourself and your values and remind you that you are not alone. The danger of teachers not going through this emotional processing, and bottling their feelings up, is that they will probably take them out on others, namely their pupils - the very people they went into the profession with aspirations to inspire and nurture. This hunch is backed up by research from Leeds Beckett University’s Carnegie School of Education, which reports that most teachers feel their poor mental health is having a detrimental effect on their teaching, pupil progress and planning.
To Learn The Future, SPL’s poetry book, admirably attempts to help teachers constructively work through their feelings, building on the success it’s already had with a similar book, Tools of the Trade, aimed at new doctors. It’s brimming with real-life scenarios that don’t pull punches on the despair and frustration that are all part and parcel of teaching. The intention, however, is to ultimately uplift.
The editors, two of which are teachers themselves, hope that readers will find a poem that “speaks to you, or that tells you what you are thinking is perfectly normal, or that reminds you why this job is so precious and vital”. Jackie Kay, Scotland’s makar, or national poet, says in her introduction that the poems are not “teaching aids, but life aids” and “not homework but heart work”.
Indeed, that’s what creativity, whether it’s poetry, pictures or music and whether you’re witnessing or creating, does best: bypassing the thinking mind and going straight to the heart, with the power to move and touch a person in a way rational argument can’t. It’s this “moving” nature that can change and lighten heavy hearts and minds in stressful moments.
So it’s ironic, not to mention deeply depressing, that at the same time that creativity’s value to mental health is being recognised, acknowledged and invested in through this initiative, the creative arts are simultaneously being subtly side-lined in Scottish education. The SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) classing music as a non-practical subject and the continual threat to the instrumental tuition service are just two examples.
But, clearly, the danger of not recognising the value of creativity to our emotional health goes much wider than just education, as seen by the massive cuts throughout the UK to arts funding in general. Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable recently said at the Mad World conference in London that he was worried about mental health problems in schools, at the same time as saying that he personally finds solace for stress in reading novels, which help calm him and see new perspectives, even amid intense mental turmoil. Yet, by cutting and sidelining the arts, politicians are shutting off this essential mental health lifeline to young, troubled minds.
If governments put their heart into educating children in the best way possible to thrive in the changing, chaotic worlds (both internal and external) we live in today, they would prioritise creativity. Perhaps the next pocket poetry book by the SPL should be made for politicians, to reconnect them with their own humanity and what’s really important in education, society and in creating a successful, happy, resilient life.
Suzy Bashford is a freelance journalist based in the Highlands of Scotland
