Browsing by Author "Ehrsten-Martin, Sabina"

Aim. The purpose of this study is to investigate what preparedness secondary schools have to respond to stu-dents with mental illness due to COVID-19. The goal of the empirical study is to find out what kind of prevention strategies schools use when dealing with students with mental illness and what kind of resources they have available in student care, given a large increase in mental illness among students. There is some research on mental illness among students and how it affects students and how it gives rise to challenges. However, there is insufficient knowledge about what the situation after COVID-19 looks like when it comes to students' mental ill-ness and schools' resources to respond to students with mental illness. My research area is limited to second-ary school students in basic education, i.e., students aged 13–15. Methods. The data collection was conducted with semi-structured interviews with a student welfare team, which consisted of five people in a school in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The five interviews were conducted using semi-structured interview questions to ensure the purpose of the survey and that the research questions are answered. The interviews were transcribed before the analysis stage. The interviews were analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Results and conclusions. The results show that mental illness among high school students is clear. Secondary school students' mental illness has increased due to COVID-19 and societal restrictions in the form of distance learning. Mental illness in the form of, among other things: anxiety, problematic school absenteeism and social phobias is now relatively common among students in secondary school. The results of this survey show that the school's resources to respond to students with mental illness have not increased after COVID-19. In addition, the school compensates for inadequate care services (child welfare, child psychiatry, social services) outside the school that do not seem to reach students in need of support services. However, according to the results of this survey, schools do not have staff who have knowledge of these services (child welfare, child psychiatry, social services) and need to get students further in order for them to get the right help and for student welfare to have time for other than just emergency falls. The results also show that the care team that participated in the interviews does not continuously use prevention strategies to promote mental health due to lack of resources. Furthermore, the results show that the covid-19 pandemic and the doctors' strike have affected the health-promoting work with students in the academic year 2021-2022. The Covid-19 pandemic has also had a negative impact on student’s well-being elsewhere in the world (Gogoi et.al, 2022, (Shanbehzadeh et.al, 2021).