WHEN APPLAUSE IS MISTAKEN FOR WELLBEING BY SCHOOLS IN INDIA

And above all, it deserves to be taken seriously. 

During a recent visit to a school in Bhopal, the same pattern followed as we use to see in many schools, the administration confidently claimed that there were no mental health issues among its students. 

Their justification? Every student received career counselling & they even have a counsellor working as teacher sometimes.

We were  curious to understand what this counselling looked like.

The Principal herself was conducting the session. Standing on a podium before nearly 400+ students, she delivered a motivational speech about careers and the future. With almost every sentence, she appeared to anticipate applause & clapping from students and teachers..

The session concluded. The applause followed....

Soon after, teachers began celebrating the event on LinkedIn.

“An excellent career counselling session by our Principal. Students were guided, everyone was happy, the feedback was overwhelming, and students conveyed their regards for such a warm session.”

Now, let me ask a difficult question.

Was this career counselling, or were we confusing a motivational address with a professional service?

And more importantly, were we doing justice to the future of 400 students?

A speech can inspire 400 students at once. But inspiration alone cannot address 400 different futures.

What concerns me even more is the economics of this arrangement. In an attempt to save a few rupees, perhaps less than the cost of a dinner, institutions may settle for generic advice instead of investing in qualified professionals. Students are then served second-hand knowledge, packaged as a comprehensive intervention.

The cheapest intervention is not necessarily the most economical. Sometimes, the real cost is paid by the students years later, when they were motivated to take admission into some eminent institutions and later on ending the lives as we have seen recently.

There is another uncomfortable contradiction here.

The school claimed to have no mental health issues. But how was that established?

You cannot declare a school mentally healthy merely because its students are smiling, participating and clapping.

Mental health difficulties are not always visible. Students can perform exceptionally well and still struggle internally. They can praise their teachers and still feel unheard. They can leave an auditorium feeling motivated and return to the same unresolved problems.

And this is where we need to confront a growing problem: the casual professionalisation of psychological language.

Motivational speaking is not counselling. Career guidance is not psychotherapy. A psychology degree, by itself, does not automatically establish competence to deliver every psychological service. Graduates in psychology need appropriate supervised training, demonstrated competencies and practice within their professional scope. Experienced professionals, too, must remain accountable to evidence, ethics and the limits of their expertise. In ManoRaksha, it is not like completing a degree and start taking cases. We do not compromise with quality.

The intensity of applause is not proportional to the level of psychological wellbeing.

A photograph of a packed auditorium may look impressive on social media. A certificate may look reassuring on a school wall. A LinkedIn post may generate hundreds of reactions.

But none of these, on its own, establishes the quality of a psychological intervention.

The real measure of a mentally healthy school is not how well it performs wellness. It is how responsibly it responds to vulnerability.

Let us stop confusing visibility with impact, motivation with counselling, and institutional claims with evidence.

Because when it comes to mental health, the future of our students deserves more than a speech, a round of applause and a celebratory LinkedIn post.

It deserves competence. It deserves science. It deserves accountability.