Adolescents—“Lightning rods for the zeitgeist”
It's always risky to explain or give reasons for a crisis, especially the mental health crisis facing young people worldwide, as the issues are tremendously complex. In a recent New York Times opinion essay, Teenagers Are Telling Us That Something Is Wrong With America, Dr. Jamieson Webster speculated on some reasons. She writes:
We seem to have forgotten that adolescents are lightning rods for the zeitgeist. They live at the fault lines of a culture, exposing our weak spots, showing the available array of solutions and insolubilities. They are holding up a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly.
I couldn't agree more. I want to add to the conversation and risk sharing some of my own thoughts. Let's begin with some statistics pointing to a global adolescent mental health crisis both before and since the Covid pandemic:
"Pooled estimates obtained in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that 1 in 4 youth globally are experiencing clinically elevated depression symptoms, while 1 in 5 youth are experiencing clinically elevated anxiety symptoms. These pooled estimates, which increased over time, are double that of prepandemic estimates." (Source)
"Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 24 in the U.S. [Between 2020-2022] nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide and 9% have made an attempt to take their lives." (Source)
"Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among youth ages 10-24 in the U.S. increased by 57%." (Source)
"From 2009 to 2019, the share of U.S. high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%, to more than 1 in 3 students." (Source)
"29 studies totaling 80,879 youth globally found prevalence estimates of clinically significant depression and anxiety symptoms to be significantly higher than the estimates reported prior to the onset of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns." (Source)
"In England, the number of hospital admissions [due to mental health crises] in the 15 to 17 years age group has increased since the start of the provided time interval from 2013-2018." (Source)
"[As early as 2015] as a result childhood behavioral problems, mood disorders in young college students, substance abuse and youth suicide are all increasing in China." (Source)
Dr. Webster and many psychoanalysts propose that youth in the States struggle due to the identity crises that infamously accompany the journey through adolescence. I agree to a certain degree. However, in my experience, this is a simplistic and somewhat outdated theory. Born from the Freudian schools of thought, it reflects industrial western White, educated, cisgender male worldviews and values, and western psychology has continued to subscribe to the theories and build upon them.
Frankly, I wonder if it is this very theory of identity that is the problem. It assumes that teenagers don't have an identity. So, when adolescents loudly proclaim who they are at any given moment, they are often met with incredulity, criticism, minimization, or invalidation. Because adolescents are not supposed to know who they are, right?
But what if the problem isn't that they don't know who they are but that we, as adults, don't know who they are? And in that not knowing, there is no clear path to supporting them effectively? It is clear there is little systemic support for young people in the world, and often even close to home.
Gone are the rites of passage integral to the young person's path from childhood to adulthood in the postmodern western world. The scaffolding that should support teens as they navigate new social complexities, tackle steep learning curves in the consumer/capitalist saturated world of employment, and stand like David before the Goliath of our current economy that gets them nowhere fast, if ever, feels almost nonexistent or at the very least inaccessible. Mentors, apprenticeships, paid internships, and an actual living wage are few and far between, especially for those who are part of marginalized populations.
High school and middle school counselors, if the school even has a full-time counseling staff, are overburdened. Teachers are even more overburdened, leaving too many teens to walk the halls as ghosts, isolated, disconnected, irrelevant, and invisible.
School shootings make our public school buildings as dangerous as any back alleyway in the dead of night. We wouldn't let our kids wander freely in those alleyways, and yet we send them on to the hallways of schools where active shooter drills are a fact of life.
Art, music, and poetry have been banished from too many schools. The creative spirit, probably the most vital underpinning of the transformative nature of adolescence, is a unicorn in education these days. And now, it seems that social emotional learning (SEL) curriculum is being challenged in school districts across the nation. Wildfires rage in the west every summer. Everywhere is vulnerable to the disruption of weather gone cockeyed. And democracy worldwide seems to teeter on the edge of an irreversible abyss while a war rages on in Ukraine, threatening nuclear reactions.
Climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pendulum swinging between neoliberalism and fundamentalism, and power and wealth centered on a very few—these are not limited to the U.S. These are worldwide events. There does not seem to be anywhere to go.
These are crises of the soul more than identity. Of course there is a mental health crisis! If that's what we want to call it. I'd like to suggest that we stop framing it this way because it pathologizes what are normal reactions to abnormal, sickening stimuli.
What if…
we begin to see that the essential nature of adolescence calls us to show up with curiosity, courage, and defiance in the face of these challenges?
we begin listening to what adolescents need and actually respond to those needs?
we listen to behaviors as simply the parts of our children who have something important to say?
we listen to symptoms as if they were the voice of the gods as C. G. Jung said?
”The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world” (in CW Vol. 13, para. 54)
Our young people are our teachers. They are the "lightning rods for the zeitgeist." They are the canaries in the mines. We would do well to listen and tend to them.
Photo by freedom_naruk