Gabrielle McFadden (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and commend Senator Gallagher on bringing the Bill before us. I am happy that it has opened a very important conversation. A great deal has been said about the first aid side of things from a physical point of view but I feel very strongly about the mental health side of things. That is what I would like to speak about. We all know about the crisis in mental health among young people. There is a great deal of evidence that the crisis is deepening. A large-scale research project in the USA surveyed 506,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 18 between 2010 and 2015 and showed that the number of young people expressing feelings of joylessness or uselessness had increased by 31%. These are classic symptoms of depression in young people. The number of suicide attempts was up by 23% in that five-year period while the number of actual suicides was up by 31%. This is a demographic change among the entire population of young people in a short period. We are fortunate to understand a lot about why this change has taken place. It is not academic pressure. There was academic pressure before 2010. It is not necessarily the result of unemployment, addiction or poverty. Unfortunately, all of these issues existed before 2010.

What has changed in this short time? One of the things that has changed is mobile phone ownership. Doctors can correlate very precisely the mental health of young people and the number of hours they spend on a phone every day. We do not know why this correlation exists. It could be because young people are less free from social comparison today. It used to be the case that the home was a sanctuary where one could escape social comparison and the pressures of being a young person. However, that is no longer the case as young people have phones with them at all times. It may be that the number of hours spent on the phone reduces the number of hours spent in person-to-person contact. We all know how invaluable that is. It is also likely that the number of hours spent on the phone decreases the number of hours spent sleeping. Everyone knows that children and teenagers in particular need a great deal of sleep.

Aside from this, parents do not want our children to be disappointed or unhappy. We do not want them to fail, to lose or to be bored. However, we should teach them how to embrace these feelings because when they reach adulthood, there will be disappointment, rejection and failure. Childhood should be about learning how to prepare for adulthood. Mental health problems come from an avoidance of emotional pain, an inability to understand the messages of emotion and the inability to figure out how to respond to the signals of pain. Mental health problems are a by-product of a difficulty reading, understanding, expressing and regulating emotion. There is lots we can do to teach emotional literacy to children. If we can have a literacy drive and teach children to understand letters, words and books, surely we can have an emotional literacy drive and teach children to understand and recognise emotion.One must teach children the vocabulary of emotion, giving examples of frustration and sadness. We must teach children that it is okay to feel these things, feelings come and stay awhile and they pass. We must teach children that it is okay to express how they feel.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, is a toolkit for emotional literacy. We need to train our preschool and primary school teachers in CBT so that they can then train our children in emotional literacy. There is very good research available. Daniel Goleman has written a book entitled, Emotional Intelligence. There is also a very good clip on YouTube by Dr. Brian McClean on emotional literacy. I urge the Minister of State to take a look at this and see how we can make it work for our children.