Governor Andrew Cuomo recently signed a law requiring that New York’s public schools will have to include information on mental health in health classes. It’s a long overdue addition, one that frankly should have come much sooner.
Students are generally not educated about the importance of mental health, and if they are, it’s almost always insufficient. Placing the topic in the curriculum alongside information on alcohol, drugs, tobacco and cancer prevention means that knowledge of mental illness is just as important as knowledge for any of those things.
Now that schools are required to teach about mental health, students will become better at recognizing the signs of mental illness and more comfortable talking about their own potential problems. If a student might need to seek treatment, it’ll become more apparent to them how they can and why they should.
In time, the toxic stigmas surrounding conversations about mental health could begin disappearing as these adolescents grow older. People will mental illnesses are rarely spoken about as being “normal.” They’re instead consigned to being “crazy” or “damaged,” but this new law directly challenges that idea by recognizing mental health for what it is: part of your overall health as a person.
If there is a downside to any of this, it’s that the law won’t start affecting curricula until 2018. Still, the fact that the step’s been made to elevate the topic in the first place is an achievement worth celebrating.