A clinical psychiatrist and lecturer, Dr Olanrewaju Ibigbami, has called for the teaching of mental health literacy in primary and secondary schools to solve mental challenges of adolescents.

Mr Ibigbami made the call on the sidelines of a stakeholders’ dissemination meeting and mental health literacy training for school counsellors in Osun State.

The meeting was organised by ‘The Mehlit Project’ in Osogbo on Wednesday.

Mr Ibigbami said there were ways students with mental health challenges could be spotted in schools stating, “once a student is noticed not doing well academically, it could be a sign of a mental health challenge.”

According to him, it is not only those mentally ill walking on the streets that have mental health challenges.

He, however, listed some of the signs of mental health challenges in young people especially the students to include; not sleeping properly, not eating well, eating too much and getting unnecessarily afraid or unnecessarily sad.

Also, he identified other signs to include unusually happy, being hyperactive, staying alone, stealing and having destructive behaviour in school.

Mr Ibigbami said that through ‘The Mehlit Project,’ school counsellors were trained in mental health literacy to detect the mental health challenges their pupils exhibit and to stop the situation from getting to the level of crisis.

He said, “The Mehlit project is a mental health literacy training programme for school counsellors in Osun, supported by the Counselling Association of Nigeria and the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. We have been able to train over 100 school counsellors. We already have data from 81 of them who responded to the test we did and it showed that the training actually improved their counselling self efficacy. Also, mental health literacy with regards to understanding what mental health problems are and how to manage them among the young people who are in secondary schools. We have also been able to work with the Counselling Society of Nigeria, to develop a template for us to scale up this training so that more counsellors in the state and beyond Osun can actually receive a similar training.’’

Dr Olayinka Oderinde, a mental health practitioner and Special Adviser to Governor Ademola Adeleke, on Special Needs, who chaired the programme, stated that the mental health literacy training commenced in September 2023.

Ms Oderinde said the focus of the project was to train educated school counsellors in mental health and how they can be of help to young adolescents having mental health challenges.

She said the training has, however, equipped the participants to identify a child that has a mental health problem, what to do and where to refer a pupil when it is beyond their capacity.

She said that steps were being taken to ensure that schools in the state have counsellors that would be included in the mental health literacy programme

(NAN)