Workshop launched to tackle challenges impacting high schoolers’ mental health
Jamaica Gleaner | 2025-12-08 | Original Article
Parental relationships, cellular phone usage, and self-esteem struggles are labelled among the major challenges impacting high school students’ mental health and Chevening, Mindfulness Jamaica, and Jonathan Grant High School have partnered on an initiative to reach the most vulnerable.
“Some of the other factors are peer pressure, bullying, and other dynamics within their families, and relationships. There is also pressure regarding their socio-economic status sometimes,” explained Alicia Harris, guidance counsellor at Jonathan Grant High School in Kingston.
In her 10 years of working at the institution, she has realised that different age groups face different challenges, particularly those compounded by social ills, and a lack of guidance and protection, key aspects of any child’s upbringing, she explained.
“When it comes to bullying and peer pressure, that affects the grade-seven students as the older ones prey on the younger ones. The older students face the issues of parent and child relationships, that is those between grades 10 and 11, while students in grades eight and nine, their challenges are really to do with the social media usage,” she said.
Issues relating to social media almost always end in conflict, quarrels and embarrassment among students, many of whom were influenced by their peers.
“So, the challenges vary with the age group. So, I want to think that this effort will really help them,” said Harris.
Harris was referencing the recent launch of the Adolescent Mental Health Workshop, a partnership with Chevening, Mindfulness Jamaica, and the high school, which was aimed at educating and empowering students re responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, how to manage social media and digital stress, and also exposure to life skills, and community engagement for mental health success. The launch was held at the British High Commission.
Sherika Ballingsing, Chevening scholar, past student of Jonathan Grant, and developer of the programme at the school, said the programme is a three-year pilot, aspects of which were rolled out earlier this year, inclusive of monthly sessions with students and Mindfulness Jamaica, an adolescent mental health support initiative.
“One of the main objectives is to empower them through their academic journey through social and academic aspects. Majority of the time we think that students are not achieving because they are not understanding at school or they are not learning, but sometimes it has to do with how they are socialised, moral support, and how they feel about themselves and their potential to achieve things,” said Ballingsing.
“So we want to give them that empowerment where they can believe in themselves, and they can have the autonomy to work towards these goals, and to have that openness in the school environment. So we are empowering them to be open, to have relationships with their teachers and peers who are stronger,” she said. “If there are social factors that are impeding them. They can discuss that with the guidance counsellor so that we can get the relevant help to assist them.”
She said that, in the end, the aim is to have a strong support group in the school.
In the meantime, Harris said parental support is among the major challenges facing guidance counsellors in the nation’s schools.
“The lack of parental support compounds this as a guidance counsellor. Because, sometimes the students express some things to you and say ‘No, don’t tell my mother because when we get home she is going to do this or that’,” she said.
“But I have to also get the mother because there are two sides to every story, and sometimes when you listen to the parents, they too have a trauma, and are sometimes taking out the trauma on the children.”
corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com
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