Mental Illness and Young adults: Part II

Part II

In Part I of this series, I talked about a training I participated in at work called the Student Support Network. I discussed how many young adults are suffering from mental illness but now I want to talk about the WHY. Why are young adults struggling so badly these days? Is life really that different than when we were young?

The answer to that is YES.

In my training, I learned that there isn’t one reason that mental illness in young adults is on the rise. One theory as to why it feels so prevalent is due to the lack of stigma about mental health today in our culture. The shame of being depressed, having anxiety, or a learning disability is gone. Which is great! It means we’ve evolved. We've also gotten better at diagnosing and getting people the treatment they need. Which also begs the question, are more people having mental illness, or are we just better at diagnosing, perhaps even over diagnosing? We may never know.

While de-stigmatization and absence of shame are great for some it can keep others stuck. Their identity can become entrenched in their diagnosis. Rather than, I am Kathy and I have depression but I’m working through it it’s I’m depressed and that’s who I am and I want everyone to know it.

I also learned that while there isn’t one reason why young adults struggle there are many theories. I really feel the need to reiterate at this point that we’re not talking about the kids who have serious mental illness here. It’s important to make that distinction because there’s a real difference between having a biochemical imbalance in your brain to lacking resilience and not being able to solve problems. The following theories relate to why the latter are struggling so much.

•     The achievement culture that parents and schools perpetuate. Many books and studies have been done on the subject. The achievement culture is where kids are driven to achieve (by parents and schools) but don’t really know why which leaves them feeling empty. 
•     The crippling debt - and fear that comes along with it - which young adults are saddled with (fueled by the achievement culture) 
•     Lack of resilience. Young adults simply do not know how to bounce back from disappointment (a bad grade), or confrontation (with a roommate), or hurt feelings (from not fitting in right away at school), and this is because parents have fixed problems for their children their entire lives so that when they reach adulthood they are unable to solve even the simplest problems. 
•      Social media is often the “go to” scapegoat about why students struggle. Especially for us “older” folk who didn’t grow up with social media. Sure, many negative things happen on social media, such as bullying, but something else you may not have thought about is that social media - on any platform - can be a bit of echo chamber.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of an echo chamber effect, it is a metaphor for describing how individuals are exposed only to information from like-minded people - in other words your thoughts and opinions are echoed back thus reinforcing or validating how you feel. Your feelings are "justified" based on the fact that others feel that way too. While it’s great to find people who are like you, to feel less alone, having someone echo your feelings, or encourage negative behavior isn’t healthy in the long run because it creates a bit of tunnel vision. Online discussion forums and social media newsfeeds are filled with people who reinforce your beliefs and cause you to be entrenched in your opinion...or diagnosis.

Echo chambers can, and do, exist outside of social media. For example, people with depression or anxiety will seek out others who are depressed or have anxiety; people who will echo their feelings. As opposed to surrounding themselves with people who aren’t struggling; people who can help bring them out of their depressed or anxiety filled state. 

Now for my own personal opinion.

If you Google “Why is mental illness on the rise” you will be shocked, as I was, to see the staggering amount of articles and studies done on this subject. What stood out to me when I Googled that sentence was that many of the articles were from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom and not just from the United States. Mental illness in young adults is on the rise across the globe. The most alarming thing that stood out was that some of those articles go as far back as the year 2000. Scientists, psychologists, and scholars have been researching the rise of young adult mental illness since at least 2000....and we are not closer to a concrete answer eighteen years later.

The theories in those articles are all similar to the theories I heard in my training. The achievement culture is the most prevalent and this one proves to be pretty convincing once you read all the data. Another interesting argument I found was that the recession of 2008 is to blame for the rise in mental illness. The argument says that the recession caused so much stress for the parents of the now young adult population and that stress trickled down to the children. Those children grew up worried and scared and that stress was gas on the fire of the achievement culture. 

This leads me to my own personal theory - or opinion - about why young adults struggle. I believe that it's because kids today are under ENORMOUS amounts of stress. I call them the "Hurry up, let's go!" generation because that's all kids ever hear. The culture we live in has us busy all...the....time. Downtime is not acceptable! Every minute of a child's day is scheduled and they better hurry up because the next thing on the list is in five minutes.

As babies they are shuffled to daycare, swim lessons, music, dance class or whatever and they better hurry up because they've got a play date then a nap then craft time then oh, hurry up and eat dinner so you can get you washed and read two books and get to bed so we can start the madness all over again the next day. I'm exhausted from just writing that. Can you imagine what a baby feels? When they get to school it doesn't get any easier either. Gone are the days of playtime in kindergarten. Benchmarks must be met!

There is so much pressure on kids to achieve in school. We live in a culture, at least in my state, where the pressure to succeed on standardized tests overwhelms kids. At the high school level there are massive amounts of homework and tests that leave kids feeling stressed. Even the strong students complain that it's too much just imagine what it's like for the kids who struggle. Our culture is very college focused so if you are one of those kids who want a different path you're treated as if you're inferior. The expectations placed on kids are simply way too high. Kids are stressed and their brains are suffering because of it.

And school isn't the only cause of stress. Parents are to blame too. Parents now watch their children like hawks, monitoring their every move on social media, controlling their friendships, and their extra-curricular life - we want them to be "well rounded" of course. Gone are the days when as a kid you left your house in the morning and didn't come back until the street lights came on. You spent all day making decisions, learning how to navigate the land and your peers, how to budget your money and your time without your parent questioning your every move. Back then there were no cell phones, no GPS, or any way really to communicate with your child unless they called home, from a pay phone.....and we all turned out just fine. Now we control every move kids make and our kids are struggling. We leave them no room to become self-regulating.

Stress has a huge impact on not only our body’s health but also our brains. 

I'm currently taking a class to become a certified meditation teacher and we talk a lot about stress. A lot. The deep-rooted kind of stress that lives within the body like a parasite buried deep within at the cellular level. This stress affects the central nervous system and can wreak havoc on your brain and physical body. It’s important to understand stress and the role it plays in your life, in your children’s lives.

You know how they say if you feel thirsty you’re already dehydrated? The goal is to stay properly hydrated so we don’t feel thirst.  (which is partly a myth. You can feel thirsty and not be dehydrated but it's one of those 'rules of thumb' that helps us all remember to hydrate.) It’s the same with stress; if you physically feel stressed, you’re at a critical point and need to take heed.

However, we are so accustomed to living at such high levels of stress, and not knowing how to get rid of it, that we ignore it and our brains get stuck in the fight, flight, freeze response which causes cortisol levels to remain at toxic levels. The stress then shows up in excess weight that you can’t lose, constant headaches and other body pains, sleep problems, depression, anxiety, etc. Stress is not something to overlook, especially in our younger generations.

Chronic stress changes the brain structure -even in babies. There is a great article that goes into this in detail so please check out the link. The article supports my theory and to some extent the theory that the recession of 2008 greatly affected the stress levels of young adults of today. They could be stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode and be functioning. When cortisol levels in our bodies are pulsating at high rates for extended periods of time and we don't counteract that with endorphins from pleasurable activities (listening to music, exercise, meditation, nap, time with friends, etc) it changes your brain chemistry for the worse.

So how can we help the kids who are struggling? We need to help our kids recognize and deal with stress. We need to advocate for and allow more downtime for kids. We need to talk to our kids about stress and expectations. We need to support our kids not fix things for them. Encourage them not control them. Liberate them not confine them. Allow for failure and be there to catch them when they fall.

By allowing our children to make choices for their own life, even at young ages, and giving them the power to be in control of their own destiny is the greatest gift you can give them. That and learning how to recognize stress.