Introduce trauma counselling in schools

We need to address how our students and pupils have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • Forgiving and letting it go should be a mandatory discipline in families.
  • When couples hoard anger and resentment, when they don’t resolve their issues, when they are still raw, they grow into prolonged anger leading to “feuds”.

The famous quote by American best-selling author Aleatha Romig in her book Consequences, “You don’t marry someone you can live with, you marry the person who you cannot live without”, seems apt for this time as we await the reopening of learning institutions closed in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

We all come from families — where husband and wife conjugate in order to create a generation. However, the conflicts in our families need to be given first-hand attention to ensure mutual peace among members.

Many of our pupils, students and school staff come from broken families. Freud talked a lot about human development, as did Erickson.

Both psychosocial and psycho-sexual development theories give us a glimpse of how we grow and the side-effects of “fixation”. Could some of the conflicts in families be a result of fixation? What causes the massacres we are witnessing in families?

Forgiving and letting it go should be a mandatory discipline in families. When couples hoard anger and resentment, when they don’t resolve their issues, when they are still raw, they grow into prolonged anger leading to “feuds”.

Such feuds end up innately unresolved and cause lots of harm to self. Eventually, the affected individual projects the anger to would-be offender(s), causing much damage and even death.

News that a couple who have lived together for years have turned into foes, leading to one killing the other, is saddening. Should such behaviour continue in families, especially where our students come from, performance will deteriorate.

So, do our schools have teachers or non-teaching staff who are experienced in trauma counselling?

The next examination results will either elevate or kick back our institutions. With the post-Covid-19 trauma, counselling must be made a priority in the plans to reopen schools.

We ought to understand the recent happenings in society. Cases that need professional attention among students, teachers and other stakeholders should be addressed before it is too late. If not, we could be sticking feathers on pigs to call them eagles.

We need to address how our students and pupils have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. If we fail to assess the impact of Covid-19 among students, then it will be very hard to break through the walls of our academic expectations.

Unfortunately, the government is spending on procurement of desks and chairs for students, yet it is seems to show less concern for the looming adverse effects of post-Covid-19 trauma on their academic performance.


James Kanindo, sociologist, The Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA)