School counseling: An approach for mental health

Pages:81-83
Fatima Shahnawaz and Shamim A. Ansari (Department of Psychology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh)

The present paper is aimed at deliberating the importance of school counseling for mental health. It is usually observed that students at school do not realize their capabilities and skills in performing their assignments at schools. This may be because of several reasons which may include lack of guidance and information dissemination and the lack of opportunity of guidance and counseling. Whenever students are in trouble and feel inability to make decisions with regard to the choice of courses and future career action. It is imperative to note that counseling is an important means for developing conducive mental health of all, especially of school students which may reflect through their academic performance. Therefore, school academic achievement in turn, may be taken as one of the strong indicators of mental health. The aim of the present endeavour is to deliberate on the importance of school counseling for better mental health and academic achievement of students in schools. Since, counseling comes after guidance, hence, guidance by means of information dissemination is to be provided to students for appropriate choice of courses before helping them through the process of counseling. Hence, present paper will discuss the role of effective counseling programme and mechanism for helping school children. Moreover, the deliberation will also focus on the inter-relationship between guidance, counseling and mental health of students as it is presumed that all the three aspects are highly related. The whole deliberation will look into the efficacy of school counseling as a means of promoting students’ mental health that may subsequently be instrumental for over-all achievements in school as well as in the professional career.