Teachers' Mental Health Amidst Covid-19 Outrage

Abstract

The impact of the Covid-19 and subsequent public health measures lead to significant mental health problems in everyone’s life. Particularly in India the school closures and the implementation of virtual teaching had placed severe demand on teachers’ working condition. This study was started with an objective to find out the psychological distress among the school teachers and their perception regarding pandemic. This is a mixed-method study conducted among the school teachers in Chennai, with the sample size of 211 participants, in which 175 were female and 36 were male. The Snow-ball sampling technique was used to collect the data using General Health Questionnaire -28 (GHQ-28) developed by Goldberg and Hillier (1979) on the Google forms portal. The researchers also collected data through the semi-structured questions. The descriptive analyses, t-test, Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation were done using the SPSS software and the content analysis was also done for the semi-structured questions. As the results of this study, it was so clear that the pandemic had significantly affected the metal health of teachers with the psychological disorders such as psycho-somatic symptoms, anxiety/insomnia, social dysfunction and severe depression. The qualitative analysis of the study had identified the positive and negative coping strategies of teaches. Furthermore, the findings of the study had indicated that more than 50% of teachers having moderate level of severe depression and it was shocking to discover the fact that 84 % of the teachers were ignorant about the awareness of the mental health helpline number. The outcome of our study had suggested a specific quality psychological training programme for all the school teachers conducted by the management on facing challenges in mere future for a better management of their mental health.