Record: Coalition for Responsible Home Education, “A Complex Picture: Results of the 2014 Survey of Adult Alumni of the Modern Christian Homeschool Movement, Installment Eight” Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (15 April 2016). [Available Here]
Summary: This post reviews the eighth installment of HARO’s survey of homeschool alumni. For the other installments in the series please click on the following links:
- Installment 1: Background and Summary
- Installment 2: Demographics
- Installment 3: Academics and Non-Academics
- Installment 4: Food and Health
- Installment 5: Religion
- Installment 6: Present and Future
- Installment 7: Sexuality
- Installment 8: Mental Health
- Installment 9: Abuse
The eighth installment of HARO’s survey explores the respondents’ previous mental health conditions, their families’ attitudes towards mental health, and the prevalence of self-harm and substance abuse.
45% of all respondents had had an appointment with a therapist, and 25% were diagnosed with a mental illness by a mental health professional. The most commonly reported mental health condition was depression. 20% of all respondents said that they were diagnosed with depression by a mental health professional. This was followed by the 16% with anxiety, 9% with panic attacks, 6% with PTSD, and 5% with self-injury. Respondents could choose multiple mental health conditions. When one includes the respondents who merely believed that they had a mental health disorder but had never been officially diagnosed, the respondents who reported mental illness jumps to 48% (25% diagnosed and 23% undiagnosed). Compared to the national average of 46% of people having a psychiatric disorder at some point in their life, HARO says that its numbers are comparable. The spectrum of disorders for undiagnosed respondents looked similar to the spectrum for the diagnosed disorders, but there was a slightly higher prevalence of self-harm and eating disorders among people who had not been officially diagnosed with a mental health condition.
14% of respondents reported that their parent or caregiver had been diagnosed with a mental illness by a mental health professional. An additional 35% believed that their parent suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness. Once again, HARO says that the sum of these figures (49% with a mental illness) is comparable to the national lifetime presence of psychiatric disorders (46%). 67% of the respondents’ parents believed that religious/supernatural reasons were either partially or entirely responsible for mental illnesses. 20% of respondents who experienced a mental illness while being homeschooled said that their parents were unaware. Even when the parents were aware, only 3% of the 13% ever got help from non-Christian counseling.
In a previous question when they asked about both diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illnesses, 11% of respondents reported self-injury. However, when asked about self-injury specifically, 28% of respondents reported struggling with self-injury. Possibly this higher incidence may be caused by the additional examples of self-harm provided in this section like “sleep deprivation” (7%) and “interfering with wound healing” (8%). Only 9% reported that they had struggled with substance abuse. However, 43% of respondents had struggled with suicidal thoughts, and 8% had actually attempted suicide. The national average of suicide consideration is only around 14%.
Appraisal: Particularly in this installment, HARO tries hard to make their sample appear representative. However, as always with the HARO reports, remember that their sample draws heavily from homeschool “survivor groups” like Homeschoolers Anonymous. Therefore, it is understandable that there is such a high prevalence of mental illness in this sample. Some of the statistics are appear quite shocking, like the 43% of respondents who said that they had struggled with suicidal thoughts, but since the sample is so unrepresentative, it does not really mean anything in the grand scheme of homeschooling research. It only allows us to make some generalizations about a very specific segment of the overall homeschooling population.
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