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Rich conversation this afternoon. Glad the education/mental health exchange seemed reasonable way to go for others as well.  It amused me to think the following two ideas are relevant in both contexts:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"  ... attributed to (among others) Albert Einstein

"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction." ... W.V.O. Quine, referring to a metaphor of Otto Neurath

And so, life is a process of building and rebuilding a home of one's own, a houseboat that is now and again suffers cracks both from its own settling and from being buffeted by the tides, and so needs to be now and again rebuilt without losing completely its buoyancy.  The task of education/mental health is not to tell anyone what house to build, nor to patch the cracks, but rather to help people enhance their own homebuilding skills and, sometimes, to provide a relatively safe harbor when skills are not up to more extreme challenges. 

That's an appealing metaphor to me.  Thanks all. 

I was struck as well by the suggestion in our conversation that education and mental health are not alway on the same wavelength, that education sometimes created mental health problems, as when students lose confidence in their own house-building abilities because they are set impossible challenges by the educational system.  What's needed here is a greater recognition that education should pay as much attention to the distinctive abilities of students as it does to their deficiences.  And a corresponding change in how we assess students.  Identifying an A as the criterion of success is to brand most people with deficiencies (or to lose any discriminative ability whatsoever in assessment, as in grade inflation).