More than 30% of Michigan children are “chronically absent” from school — and now state lawmakers want to make it even easier to cut class by mandating up to five “mental health days” each year.
They seek to help students with mental health challenges, but their solution would do more harm than good.
The problem is serious. More than 20% of school-age children in the United States have a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder, an estimated 50% of mental illnesses appear before the age of 14, and reports of suicidal behavior among high school students have risen 40% in the last decade. Something must be done to investigate and help solve the mental health epidemic.
H.B. 4389 and S.B. 29 would allow up to five absences per year without a note from a medical professional. The bills dictate that if a student uses two “mental health” days, they “may” be referred to see a counselor or administrator. There are many blind spots of this legislation, such as the lack of parental involvement and follow-up protocols for students who use their mental health days, and the fact that this might skyrocket Michigan’s already low attendance rates. But the most concerning aspect of this legislation is its logic.
“Mental health day” policies destroy any distinction between students who are simply using a mental health excuse to get five days off and students who are actually dealing with conditions like clinical depression and anxiety. Instead of encouraging the cultivation of mental wellbeing, these policies normalize mental health issues and destroy the sensitivity and gravity of many students’ very real mental health conditions.
School is stressful, and everyone experiences feelings of anxiety and sadness at some point. But creating a policy that effectively equates bouts of poor mental illness with unavoidable physical illness is not a viable solution to the rising rates of mental health issues among school-age children and adolescents.
Legislation like Michigan’s creates a one-size-fits-all policy where protocols from individual institutions would be most effective and practical in addressing specific districts’ and students’ concerns. Individual schools should certainly create policies for students who struggle with serious, recurring mental health issues to know that they can approach a teacher, administrator, or counselor, and can receive an excused absence from school. But making students take the initiative to seek out these excused absences will ensure that the reason will be legitimate and will create a system of accountability and awareness, so that the teachers and counselors know to contact the student’s family members and ensure their safety while they are away from school, especially if there is a potential for students to become harmful to themselves. This system would encourage accountability and compassion, instead of providing kids wanting to skip class with a blanket excuse that delegitimizes students who are actually struggling with very real mental health issues.
Low-effort legislation like Michigan’s will not solve the mental health epidemic among schoolchildren because it normalizes widespread mental health issues. It doesn’t encourage students to make healthy choices or purposefully work to heal and prevent mental health relapses. And it doesn’t take into account the many underlying causes of mental health issues, such as bullying, technology and social media, and the lack of social interaction, physical exercise, and healthy food at schools.
Ultimately, this type of legislation and school policy denotes how casually our society treats mental health issues. Instead of something to mitigate and overcome, mental and behavioral disorders are something to be expected and even normalized. Giving students five “get out of school free” passes, just because they say they’re sad or stressed, only encourages students to avoid the problems that are causing these feelings instead of facing them head-on.
Adolescence and young adulthood are full of transition and uncertainty, but rather than teaching students how to handle these challenges that will only continue into adulthood, “mental health days” policies teach them that these feelings cannot be overcome – that they have to sink into isolation and forego their commitments to fully cope with their feelings.
This will only lead to an increase in the emotional immaturity and weakness of future generations while lumping students who actually suffer from recurring episodes of poor mental health together with students wanting a bit more time to study for an exam or hoping to avoid their class bully. There are other solutions to those problems, and although they take more intentionality, time, and resources from parents, teachers, and school administrators than signing off on a mental health day with no check-in or follow-up, they would be more effective at cultivating resilient students who are able to grapple with their problems or seek intervention when necessary.
It’s probably a good thing that the mental health day bills in both branches of the Michigan legislature have been gridlocked since early 2023. This is a problem that individual schools, school boards, and parents need to decide for themselves, their communities, and their students – not legislators who aren’t willing to allocate actual funds and ask uncomfortable, unpopular questions about why rates of mental health issues are rising and what can be done to mitigate, not expect, these issues among the youngest and most vulnerable members of society.
