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The Social

"Sometimes parents perceive that it was done (CST Intervention) one way and that wasn't it at all. But when you're talking about something that somebody is having a difficult time accepting, their perception can be very different from reality. Especially when you're talking about their child. A lot of times with parents, there's so much guilt involved, especially with mothers. 'Was it that cup of coffee I had, was it that mimosa I had at breakfast?'

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Did I do something wrong? Did I, was it my fault? You know, did I not eat right? Did I…” there's all these questions you have. And part of that is when you go to get evaluated to see if there's something medically wrong with your child. That's the first thing they start asking is, “did you drink while you were pregnant? Did you take any medication? Did you take any antibiotics when you were sick, did you, did you do this? Did you do this?” Because they're looking for all these stratagems. But when a parent or mother looks at it, she's not saying, Oh, they're looking for these medical things. What she's hearing and she's thinking to herself is they're looking to see if I did something wrong, if it's my fault, and when the teachers ask questions, it's not, they're trying to help my child. They're looking at things to help my child.

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It's they're looking to see if it is my fault. They're looking to see what I did wrong. That's often the case. And conversely, when the principal and the intervention specialist is asking the teacher, “what interventions did you use, what did you do to support the student?”. The teacher sitting there feeling like, well, they're thinking, I didn't do anything. I'm thinking I didn't do anything. They're thinking it's my fault the kids acting this way. And that's not necessarily true, but everyone takes such responsibility that that's their lens, that they look at it through and it everything that they do and everything that they say. Yeah. And it's really hard to step out of that sometimes and not personalize it."

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-Amy Miller, Intervention Specialist

"There's so much guilt involved, especially with mothers. 'Was it that cup of coffee I had, was it that mimosa I had at breakfast?'"

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The way that we talk about mental illness is so intertwined with blame and guilt. Especially when you feel like you have failed your child, or they are not living up to the entire preconceived narrative you had mapped out in your head for them. 

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And the way we institutionally talk about mental illness has the same blame language. 

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Our stories are so directly intertwined with the people who are dependent on us. So when it comes to seeing something "wrong" with our children, the questions start flying.

 

Mental illness is still seen as situational. And it makes sense, because when we look at the symptoms, they look fixable. They look like something that is cause by something. And we want to figure that story out by nature. We want to but the ante narrative together, "what if it was the medication I was on? What if I did something wrong. What should I have don't to fix this?"

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There is a powerful mental model of shifting the burden here. In this archetype, all three parties; the doctors, the teachers, and the parents are all getting asked and asking themselves the same questions. "What did I do wrong to cause this child's issues?" or "What did you do wrong to cause this child's issues?"

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But luckily, there are some leverage points here:

  1. Creating a cohesive narrative through communication of stories

  2. Creating blame-free vocabulary

  3. Approaching intervention with compassion 

  4. Not looking at mental and behavioral issues as symptoms of mistakes

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