You wake up, brush your teeth, go to school, come home from school, go to sleep, wake up, brush your teeth, go to school, come home from school, go to sleep, and again, and again, and one more time, and for the next four years of your life. Oh, the agony! 

Isn’t it exhausting? Aren’t you bored? Aren’t you tired? Well get this, the new and improved “faking sick” day: a mental health day. A sick day for the liberal! Each semester you have your pick of five days when you can choose to sit in your room feeling depressed and unproductive all day long! Then, tomorrow you can feel a little more behind and left out than you usually do because you missed a day of school. Talk about rad!

Ok, bit’s over. Too far. I’ll be real with you guys, mental health days are bleak. They suck. There is no way that a completely captive lifestyle of overworking the students of today can be solved with a few days off. If anything, mental health days make the cycle worse. They add more stress to students because they can set students behind on school work and make them more stressed than before. Also, the feeling of rotting in your bed doing nothing and being unproductive is painful to the very core of your body. 

It would be nice to live in a world in which a day of rest is rejuvenating, but the sad fact of the matter is that we live in a society that values productivity over most other things. This leaves mental health days more damaging than helpful. What once was started as a real push to lower suicide and depression rates in children, has now been watered-down into letting children miss entire school days because it is simply too much. We’ve given up on providing more measures to help kids in school that we’ve just let them “sit out for a day.” 

It’s evident that kindergarten through twelfth grade administrations have found that the education system is not compatible with the brain chemistry of children and teenagers. Yet, after years of vainly trying to put little mental health signs around schools, they simply stopped trying, leaving students to flounder on their own with a few days off of school. It’s a small patch over a huge hole. If we continue to put these patches over the huge problem that is the American education system, we will lose the integrity of the system as a whole and leave kids equally, if not more, depressed than before. Losing the prestige of the education system is not something the United States can afford, as the wealth gap grows and grows each day. 

If our society is dependent completely on the education system, students will continue to suffer; it doesn’t matter how many “mental health days” they are given. The greater the push for mental health days grows, the further we stray from our path to help depression in children and teens, and the closer we become to a weak society that can not stand.