Dr. Harry Barry:

Very good questions have been asked. If we take something like mindfulness, short mindfulness, up to three minutes at a time, could be practised in all schools, even as an automatic way of starting and finishing their day. Schools that have done this have noticed a definite improvement in the well-being of their students.

There are a few critical skills that I would be very concerned about. There is a massive epidemic of something as simple as panic attacks. We need to be teaching children in primary school all about emotions, and the physical reaction to emotions. We need to teach them the skills - in a very simple way - to deal with them. Students are arriving in as adolescents and hitting all of the difficulties that adolescence brings. They are swamped by the world of social media and smartphones, and they simply lack the appropriate skills. I would hear about a young person, for example, who might be self-harming and cutting themselves because nobody has taught him or her how to deal with panic attacks. Teaching students simple skills to deal with these attacks can often eliminate their self-harming and its causes.

I have talked to many teachers about this and many would love to receive some very simple training techniques that they could apply in their classes. We are not talking about rocket science here. I love my psychologists friends but part of the difficulty is there is a feeling among the lay population that we need a psychologist to tell us how to do everything. We need psychologists. They are superb at what they do, they are really important and give us these academic, solid foundations. We also need, however, very simple skills. Sometimes our children do not need massive psychological interventions. They just need somebody to talk to them, to ask them what is going on, to allow them to express their emotions and to teach them how to handle physical symptoms. These skills could be learned quite simply by many teachers and applied. We must also involve parents. A number of parents have told me they feel almost out of control. They feel they do not have the necessary skills to know what to do when their child or adolescent is in trouble. A lot of those skills are equally very simple skills.

The more work we put in in trying to educate parents and teachers as to how best to apply these very simple techniques in primary and secondary school will head off a lot of difficulties. We are waiting until the child is in crisis and then we are all jumping in asking what we are going to do. Our CAMH services are overrun. The reason they cannot handle the numbers is because so many of the children being referred to them are inappropriate referrals, or else people have been waiting until the child is really distressed and in trouble before trying to intervene.

We need to think of the idea of the river and teach children how to swim. This applies not just to children, but a lot of adults-----