School Suspensions and Expulsions Can Lead to a Lifetime of Depression

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by the University of Arkansas.

Each year, nearly 5 million children in the U.S. are suspended or expelled from school. New research from the U of A found this type of school discipline can lead to higher rates of depression through adolescence and into early adulthood.

The findings were published in the latest issue of Advances in Life Course Research. The study provides empirical evidence for previous suggestions by scholars that school suspensions and expulsions can have long-term effects on mental health.

Driven by zero-tolerance policies, school suspensions and expulsion rose by roughly 50 percent from the 1970s through 2010. Exclusionary discipline, once reserved for violent acts, drug use or possession of weapons, has increasingly been imposed for less serious behaviors.

In the U.S., six out of 10 schools still use exclusionary discipline, even though researchers have questioned its effectiveness. Boys, economically disadvantaged young people and Black, Latino and Native American students more often receive suspensions and expulsions.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), an ongoing study of 20,000 people who were adolescents in the mid-1990s, Angton and her colleagues were able to track how often students who were suspended or expelled reported depression later in life.

Adolescents who were suspended or expelled showed “significantly higher depressive symptoms,” the researchers found. This group’s self-reported rates of depression decreased slightly in their late teens and early 20s, and then rose again as they reached their early 30s, the most recent data available in the Add Health survey.

Source: University of Arkansas
https://news.uark.edu/articles/72805/school-suspensions-and-expulsions-can-lead-to-a-lifetime-of-depression