Mental health issues and gaming boosting truancy

WELLINGTON: More young people are skipping school or refusing to enrol at all because of mental health problems and excessive online gaming.

Attendance services responsible for getting truants back to school repeatedly cited growth in both problems in their reports to the Education Ministry this year.

‘‘Mental health is still an ongoing and escalating issue,’’ wrote one of the Auckland attendance services.

The service responsible for the lower South Island said some teenagers avoided school because of negative interactions via social media and the problem was now starting to affect younger children.

The attendance service for Wellington warned of ‘‘significant barriers presenting around anxiety, depression, selfharming, dyslexia’’.

‘‘We are seeing underlying issues of stressed young people,’’ it warned.

An attendance service covering the central and lowercentral North Island said it had observed an ‘‘increase in children presenting with depression and anxiety and possible undiagnosed mental health’’.

‘‘We also note that students seem to be presenting [with] these issues at an earlier age,’’ it said.

Auckland City Education Services manager Karyl Puklowski said mental wellbeing was a huge factor for children from the ages of 12 to 15 and it was hard to get the right help.

‘‘If you’ve got a young person who’s hiding in the bedroom and doesn’t want to get out, and help can’t come to the house it becomes really hard to try to get the right support in place. So mental wellness is becoming really a huge reason for what we’re dealing with,’’ she said.

Addiction to online gaming was also a problem.

‘‘The other thing that we’re finding with anxiety that’s impacting on us is increasing is addiction to gaming.

‘‘Of course, if you’re up all night playing it you’re not going to get up in the morning and if you do get up in the morning you’re not going to be very present of mind and [will be] falling asleep at your desk.’’

Auckland Secondary Principals Association president Richard Dykes said in many cases schools did not have the right skills or expertise to provide the required help and support.

‘‘Every school will have counsellors, every school will have deans — there’s a whole series of progressions where we provide pastoral care.

‘‘The demand is going past that and schools are having to tap into outside services and I think the fear of principals is that funding for those services isn’t there and we’re feeling a lot more pushback,’’ he said.

Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin said the Government recognised there was a serious problem.

‘‘We have a crisis of anxiety in our schools. We have had for a number of years,’’ she said.

‘‘The young people with anxiety are . . . younger and younger and we have not figured out why.’’

Ms Martin said a Governmentfunded trial of counsellors in Canterbury schools was working well and she wanted to extend the scheme to more schools.

How that would be done was still being discussed.

Attendance service reports also cited poverty, alcohol and drug addiction, and housing pressures as common problems for truants. — RNZ