Dear Editor,

Each time violence erupts in or around a Jamaican school, public attention turns to discipline, security, and — too often — teacher blame. What remains consistently underexamined is the deeper crisis driving much of this behaviour: the deteriorating mental health of our children.

Over the past decade, available evidence and professional testimony have pointed in the same direction. Jamaican adolescents are experiencing unprecedented levels of emotional distress, trauma exposure, depression, and behavioural dysregulation.

These realities do not disappear when a child enters a classroom; they walk in with them, sit at desks, and often explode under pressure.

No Jamaican thinker understood this more clearly than the late psychiatrist Professor Frederick W Hickling. He repeatedly warned that Jamaica was misreading psychological distress as indiscipline and criminal tendency — especially among children. His work insisted that much school violence is not born of inherent wickedness, but of untreated trauma, emotional injury, and developmental difficulty.

Through initiatives such as Dream-A-World Cultural Therapy, Hickling demonstrated that when children with behavioural challenges receive culturally grounded psychological support within the school environment, both conduct and learning improve. His message was simple, but uncomfortable: You cannot punish trauma out of a child.

Yet years after his death the national response remains muted. Mental-health literacy programmes exist, but they are limited in scale. Guidance counsellors are overburdened. Access to child psychologists and psychiatrists is scarce.

Teachers are left to manage crises they were never trained for, while courts and public opinion increasingly expect them to intervene physically in volatile situations.

This is neither fair nor effective.

When large numbers of children carry untreated mental distress, schools become pressure points. Minor conflicts escalate rapidly, and impulse control breaks down.

Teachers hesitate to intervene — not out of indifference, but out of fear of unpredictable violence or later retaliation by parents.

If Jamaica is serious about reducing school violence, then mental health must be treated as core educational infrastructure, not an optional add-on. That means embedded child and adolescent mental-health support across schools, trauma-informed training for educators, and early intervention long before behaviour turns dangerous.

Honouring Hickling’s legacy requires more than praise. It demands action. Until we address the mental health of our children with the seriousness it deserves, we will continue to manage symptoms while ignoring the disease.

Dudley McLean II

dm15094@gmail.com