What If Mental Health Education Started With Emotional Literacy?

I am a Primary School Doctor on Fridays helping kids and their families with struggles around poor emotional health.

One can frame this as their “EQ” perhaps. EQ for Emotional Quotient (also often called Emotional Intelligence).

Some struggle mainly with processing the “feelings of others” leading to predominantly social anxiety.

Some struggle mainly with processing their own feelings/emotions leading to shame, anxiety, anger, emotional dysregulation, self doubt, and depressed mood.

Some especially with ADHD/ASD wiring, can struggle immensely with both.

Counseling whether it’s in the form of CBT. Psychoeducation, ACT, DBT. EFT, IPT are simply ways of teaching “Emotional Literacy”.

I hope that if we can frame “therapeutic frameworks” as “emotional literacy”, more kids can have access to the above skills at a school level, and if as a society, we are more emotionally literate, then less mental health issues perhaps.