Mental Health Surveillance Gaps in Indonesian Secondary Education: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Institutional Failures and Cascading Psychological Crisis

A documented mental health crisis affects 33% of Indonesian adolescents, with only 2.6% accessing professional services. Secondary education systems demonstrate persistent gaps between identified mental health needs and institutional capacity to respond. This study employs autoethnographic analysis integrated with systematic engagement of peer-reviewed literature to examine institutional mechanisms through which policy failures cascade into individual psychological distress. Research reveals that surveillance failures are not implementation gaps but structurally produced through educational paternalism, conformity-enforcing social systems, chronic cognitive dissonance in critical thinkers, cognitive impairment resulting from burnout, suppression of authentic identity, and systematic teacher mental health literacy deficits. The analysis yields three principal contributions: (1) a cascading crisis model demonstrating how structural policy failures transmit through institutional, social, cognitive, and psychological levels; (2) reconceptualization of anxiety and critical thinking as accurate threat detection rather than individual pathology in genuinely toxic environments; and (3) autoethnographic evidence of student perspective systematically absent from policy discourse. Methodologically, the study demonstrates autoethnography's capacity to generate institutional knowledge through insider access to dynamics invisible to conventional research methods. The research generalizes patterns identified across multiple Indonesian secondary education contexts, with policy implications for mandatory educator mental health literacy training, prevention-oriented rather than crisis-driven systems, embedding mental health within educational policy infrastructure, and substantive inclusion of student voice in program design. The study makes urgent case that psychological harm documented in adolescent populations is not inevitable consequence of schooling but result of specific institutional choices choices amenable to reform.