Helping students manage emotions: REBT as a mental health educational curriculum

In preparing children to deal with life in an increasingly complex society, it is important that schools devote attention to well-organised and theoretically sound programmes employing a preventive approach to mental health. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), as indicated in its name, incorporates changes to thought processes and behaviours. It is a cognitive–emotive–behavioural system of therapy, and is based on the assumption that emotional problems result from illogical and irrational patterns of thinking about an event rather than from the event itself. REBT is a mental health and an educational intervention. It attempts to teach students how to help themselves by providing a structured method of processing extreme emotions. The purpose of this article is to provide practitioners with a knowledge base and practical applications of REBT that have been successfully implemented in various educational contexts.