Tips for Guidance Counselors

• Recognize that learning to cope with asthma can be difficult. Students may have low self-esteem, withdraw from activities, or have difficulty in completing their schoolwork. Counseling with the student and/or parent(s) may help students to handle problems more effectively.
• Help school personnel to understand that asthma is not an emotional or psychological disease. Extreme emotions such as laughing or crying can trigger an asthma episode because these emotions can constrict the airways of a person with asthma.
• Help to educate classmates about asthma so they will be more understanding and know when to get help from an adult. If you need assistance in talking about asthma, contact your school nurse or the American Lung Association of Minnesota.
• Counsel potentially pregnant students that they need to seek medical care for their asthma as well for the baby's development.
• Assist students with asthma to think about avoiding triggers in their career and college choices. Some career choices require exposures to fumes, vapors, and dusts that may aggravate their asthma. Some college campuses have high levels of pollens, molds, and air pollution, which can also aggravate asthma.

Adapted from Managing Asthma: A Guide for Schools. National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institutes (NHLBI), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Fund for the Improvement and Reform of Schools and Teaching, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education. September 1991. NIH Publication No. 91-2650.

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