Depression and school performance: An analysis from the perspective of high school teachers during the remote teaching period

Abstract

Depressive disorders, especially among high school teenagers, raise in periods of personal conflicts, such as adolescence, affecting students' development and performance, as well as teachers’. This problem became stronger during the emergency remote teaching period caused by COVID-19 pandemic. This work aims to understand how high school teachers perceive and deal with students’ symptoms of depression and how they see its impact on students' performance, measuring, simultaneously, the consequences of adopting the emergency remote teaching because of COVID-19 pandemic. It comprehends a bibliographic study followed by a questionnaire answered by teachers from a public school based in Alegrete, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The collected data were analyzed and organized using the discursive textual analysis method. We identified similar answers concerning decline in performance caused by depression, teachers’ role towards this issue and impacts of emergency remote teaching. The responses indicate that teachers don't feel trained to deal with depression among students, despite being aware of their importance in that matter. We concluded that it is necessary to improve formal training of teachers on mental health and, also, to provide specialized psychological assistance for students in schools.