Docile Minds: Discursive Implications of Mental Health Policies Related to Young People in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated how administrative interests impact understandings of youth mental health in Ontario’s public education system. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s model of Administrative Control as a theoretical framework and Norman Fairclough’s five-stage method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a research methodology, this report examined seven (7) policy documents released between 2011 and 2015. These documents include the Ontario secondary school Health and Physical Education curriculum document, two provincial policy documents, a report commissioned by an independent charitable organization, an online resource hosted by a children’s mental health centre, a report commissioned by a national non-profit organization, and a public school board implementation plan. Results of the study revealed a powerful underlying interest in Administrative Control that presents systemic barriers to the development of positive student mental health outcomes. Discursive constructions of youth mental health in Ontario were found to associate mental health with a set of adverse clinical outcomes to be monitored and reported. More specifically, existing discourses were found to (a) prioritize clinical approaches to addressing adverse individual outcomes over developmental approaches to promoting psychological resilience, (b) call for sweeping normalization, to promote simplistic notions of risk and protection, (c) discursively appropriate the concept of mental health through collectivization, and to exclude the role of challenge as a developmental tool. Instead, this study suggests that mental health should be reframed within the context of public education policies as an ongoing developmental process of adjustment to a range of environmental factors. Finally, this study recommends the application of psychological resilience, academic resilience, and academic buoyancy as underlying constructs in the development of future school mental health policies. This study contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of discourse in both reflecting and shaping mental health outcomes among young people in Ontario.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".