Every few weeks another headline appears. Rates of anxiety are rising. More young people are struggling with their mental health. Waiting lists continue to grow. Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death for young people, while addiction, loneliness and burnout continue to affect millions of lives.
Each time, the response is remarkably similar. We ask how we can improve services, increase funding or provide more support to those already in crisis. Those conversations are important, and they matter enormously. But they all begin at the same point: after someone is already struggling.
The question we should be asking is far simpler.
Why are we waiting until people are struggling in the first place?
Imagine if we approached physical health this way. We wouldn't dream of teaching children about brushing their teeth only once they needed fillings, or explaining healthy eating after they had developed serious illness. We understand instinctively that prevention works. We teach habits early because we know they shape health for life.
Yet when it comes to mental health, we continue to treat emotional wellbeing as something to discuss only when things begin to fall apart.
Somewhere along the way, we've accepted that children will leave school knowing algebra, photosynthesis and the causes of the First World War, yet many will have no real understanding of how their own minds work. They'll know very little about stress, emotional regulation, self-awareness, healthy coping strategies, relationships, boundaries or how to recognise when they need support. They'll spend more than a decade in education, yet receive only fragments of the knowledge they'll rely on every single day for the rest of their lives.
This isn't a criticism of teachers. Quite the opposite. Schools are being asked to solve increasingly complex problems with increasingly limited time and resources. Most teachers care deeply about their pupils' wellbeing, but they cannot be expected to compensate for a system that still treats emotional education as an optional extra instead of a fundamental life skill.
The reality is that emotional intelligence underpins almost everything we do. It shapes how we respond to pressure, how we communicate, how we parent, how we build relationships, how we lead teams, how we cope with loss and uncertainty, and how we recover when life inevitably becomes difficult. It influences the decisions we make every day, often without us even realising it.
When these skills aren't taught, people don't simply stop experiencing difficult emotions. They still experience stress, grief, fear, rejection, disappointment and failure, but they're left to figure out how to deal with those experiences on their own. Some develop healthy ways of coping. Many don't.
That is often where problems begin.
Unmanaged stress becomes chronic stress. Anxiety becomes overwhelming. Shame turns into silence. Trauma remains unresolved. People search for relief wherever they can find it, whether that's through alcohol, drugs, gambling, food, endless scrolling, unhealthy relationships or work itself. These behaviours rarely begin because someone wants to destroy their life. More often, they're attempts to manage emotional pain using whatever tools happen to be available.
Of course, mental illness and addiction are complex. They are influenced by genetics, life experiences, social circumstances and countless other factors. No school programme could ever eliminate every case of depression, addiction or suicide, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise.
But that's also missing the point.
The aim of prevention isn't perfection. It's preparation.
It's about ensuring that every young person understands what stress feels like before they're overwhelmed by it. That they recognise anxiety before it controls their lives. That they know asking for help is a strength rather than a weakness. That they understand emotions are signals to be understood, not enemies to be avoided.
Those lessons don't simply benefit the individual. They ripple outwards into every part of society.
Poor mental health doesn't exist in isolation. Addiction affects families. Burnout affects workplaces. Violence affects communities. Suicide leaves lifelong impacts on everyone left behind. The consequences are emotional, social and economic, stretching far beyond the individual who is suffering.
We spend extraordinary amounts of money responding to these problems after they've developed. We fund treatment services, rehabilitation programmes, crisis interventions and emergency support, all of which are essential and deserve continued investment. But comparatively little attention is given to stopping people reaching crisis in the first place.
It is difficult to think of another area of public health where prevention receives so little attention despite offering such enormous potential.
Imagine a generation leaving education with the same confidence in managing their mental wellbeing as they have in reading or using technology. Imagine young adults entering workplaces already understanding emotional regulation, resilience, communication, boundaries and self-awareness. Imagine parents raising children with the language and confidence to talk openly about emotions because they themselves were taught these skills growing up.
That isn't wishful thinking.
It's what happens when we decide that emotional education deserves the same importance as academic education.
For too long, we've viewed mental wellbeing as something that belongs within healthcare. In reality, it belongs in education just as much. By the time someone reaches a therapist's office, an addiction service or a crisis team, prevention has already missed its opportunity. Those services perform extraordinary work, but they should never carry the burden alone.
If we genuinely want to reduce the number of people experiencing poor mental health, we have to stop asking how we respond better to crisis and start asking how we create fewer crises in the first place.
That conversation starts in our schools and colleges.
Because emotional intelligence isn't a luxury. It isn't an enrichment activity. It isn't something to fit into the timetable if there's a spare afternoon.
It is one of the most important skills a human being will ever learn.
The greatest gift we could give the next generation isn't simply better access to support when life goes wrong.
It's giving them the knowledge, confidence and emotional tools to navigate life's challenges long before they ever reach breaking point.