Skolkurativa perspektiv på att främja psykisk hälsa : Att hantera och hanteras i skolans dramaturgi

Sammanfattning: Abstract Author: Marinette Kindeland Title: School Social Work’s perspective on Promoting Mental Health – to be handled and to handle in the School Dramaturgy Supervisor: Alexandru Panican Assessor: Anna Angelin From the 1980s until today, a doubled number of youths are suffering from mental illness in Sweden. One of the most important institutions that meet and socialize young people, are schools. Swedish schools are obliged to provide their students support from Student’s health professionals, one of them is the School Social worker – the counsellor. The purpose of this study was to explore how counsellors describe and promote mental health among students, as well as legitimize their role among co-workers in the Student’s Health Team. The method used was semi-structured interviews with eight counsellors active in Lower and Upper Secondary School. The empirical findings were analysed using the analytical framework of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory. The main findings were that the Swedish School Law’s demands to focus on health promoting interventions and illness prevention was understood differently among the interviewees. Less work was done concerning the health promoting work, and more of preventing and remediating work. Much of the work was with individual support to students, understood from the dramaturgical perspective, to let the play continue playing and taking care of the ones that don’t fit in the play. However, the counsellors considered themselves to take the student’s perspectives, and they expressed a resistance to make the individual ‘fit the play’ and to alone bear the responsibility for their problems, instead taking the student’s circumstances in consideration. Teamwork with teachers was important for successful prevention and promotion work. The work concerning promoting mental health to the larger population of students included e.g. lectures about health, sleep or stress reduction, but little systematics was used in the evaluation and planning of interventions.