Mental Health in Teacher Education

Student mental health has been a pervasive crisis in the United States long before the pandemic, with 1 in 5 people living with mental illness (CDC, 2024). In general, teacher education programs have failed to offer comprehensive curricula that meaningfully address students who live with mental illness. Moreover, programs that do offer a mental health component tend to pathologize students, focusing exclusively on crisis management and suicide prevention rather than incorporating education on how to better include students in the classroom (Atkins & Rodger, 2016; Wood et al., 2014). The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to examine the lived experiences of preservice teachers living with mental illness. Participants discussed their schooling and how their illness affects their emerging teaching philosophies. As context is critical to meaning making (Phillion & Connelly, 2004) and narrative researchers should participate in ongoing autobiographical inquiry (Caine et al., 2019), this study also included the researcher’s narratives of lived experiences. The themes of connection, understanding, equity, and stigma, were examined across all participant narratives, and this study’s findings advance the discussion for improvements needed for teacher education and multicultural perspectives.