headteacher-secondary

teachwire.net Depression and anxiety drove AndySammons to the brink – but compassion focused therapy helped himback. Could it work for our whole school system? “I no longer wanted TO BE ALIVE ” I should have acted at the first sign of trouble. A perfectly innocent email dropped in my inbox, and I cried. A lot. For about 10 minutes. At the time, I had just turned 32. I had a beautiful two-year-old and an incredible wife. But at that point I found myself lying on my parents’ couch and sobbing uncontrollably. It’s safe to say that 2018 was an appalling year for me. Without knowing how I got there, I had plummeted into a black hole of depression and anxiety so deep that I no longer wanted to be alive. When my little boy cried, my stomach would lurch with anxiety and panic. The thought of going in to work every day gave me a 10-tonne weight on my chest. Working as a head of department in an unstable environment for months had destroyed my mind’s ability to rationalise. I was gone, mentally. Totally. Working my way out of this – as I continued to do for some after – forced me to consider education in its widest sense, and the systems we find ourselves in. Two things became abundantly clear to me. First, that the cruellest thing about depression and anxiety is that it’s like a living death, but one you can only really fix from inside – albeit with some help from others. Secondly, if we take a look at the mental health literature and map it onto our educational context in the UK, we see that the system itself is inadvertently encouraging everyone inside it into behaviours which might seem rational, but are profoundly harmful to their own – and others’ – mental wellbeing. An evolved approach At my lowest point, I sought help from a therapist. She drew three circles on a sheet of paper, each containing single word: Threat , Soothe and Drive . The approach we were using is called compassion focused therapy, and it has roots in evolutionary psychology. The thinking goes as follows. We all have three parts to our brains: a ‘threat’ part, which is the most basic and powerful of our evolved brains (from our reptilian days); a ‘drive’ part linked with status and achievement (coming in during our mammalian days); and then a more recently evolved ‘soothe’ part (more directly ascribable to humans, with links to attachment, kindness, care and affection). In effect, when we perceive threats in our environment, they essentially trigger a panic state within the brain that can have long-lasting and sometimes appalling consequences for our mental health. As the most powerful part of the brain, the threat system has the override – much like how a fire alarm will assume priority over everything else when it’s necessary to get people out of a building. Unfortunately, this threat system is not so great at finding answers to complex solutions – it’s much better at telling us to run from tigers, I suppose. Our bodies even tell us when we’re in threat mode – palpitations, sweating, breathlessness and that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach or chest, which may sound familiar to some… Everything in our society – and I include education in this – is structured in a way that encourages us to forget that we are evolved beings whose brains aren’t evolved solely to meet the challenges of modern living. Unless we consciously remind ourselves of this, and make space between ourselves and our thoughts, feelings 6