Impact of School Environment on Mental Health of Secondary-level Students

Abstract

A mentally healthy person shows a harmonious organization of desirable attitude, healthy values and righteous self-concept and a scientific perception of the world as a whole. School is the chief instrument of positive mental health program. It has the responsibility of helping a child achieve those behavior characteristics that can ensure for him the making of satisfactory adjustments to the demands of environment. So there has been made an effort to study the impact of school environment on the mental health of secondary level students. For this, multi-stage random-sampling technique was adopted. 600 students were drawn randomly from 10 randomly selected secondary level schools of three randomly selected districts (i.e., Bareilly, Badaun and Pilibhit) of Rohilkhand region. Two standardized tests were used – School Environment Inventory (Dr. K. S. Mishra) and Mental Healthy Battery (Arun Kumar Singh and Alpna Sen Gupta). This survey research leads us to the conclusion that higher the creative stimulation, higher the cognitive encouragement, higher the acceptance, higher the control and lower the rejection in school environment, better the mental health of students.