Teens Need Help - Now!

There are three good articles at The NY Times about teen mental health. One is a 14-minute video, one is an article and one is an informational article. If you have a teen, I urge you to read and listen to all of them. As well, there is a moving article at The New Yorker.

I urge you to forward this post to your PTA and ask that it be put up on the PTA page.

NY Times article

American adolescence is undergoing a drastic change. Three decades ago, the gravest public health threats to teenagers in the United States came from binge drinking, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy and smoking. These have since fallen sharply, replaced by a new public health concern: soaring rates of mental health disorders.

In 2019, 13 percent of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, a 60 percent increase from 2007. Emergency room visits by children and adolescents in that period also rose sharply for anxiety, mood disorders and self-harm. And for people ages 10 to 24, suicide rates, stable from 2000 to 2007, leaped nearly 60 percent by 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New Yorker article

The blizzard of conflicting statistics points to our collective ignorance about an area in which more and better studies are urgently needed. Still, in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States suicide claimed the lives of more than five hundred children between the ages of ten and fourteen, and of six thousand young adults between fifteen and twenty-four. In the former group, it was the second leading cause of death (behind unintentional injury). This makes it as common a cause of death as car crashes. 

 

Among the general population, suicides declined, but this change masks a slight increase among younger people and a spike among the country’s Black, Latinx, and Native American populations. Last October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that the pandemic had accelerated the worrying trends in child and adolescent mental health, resulting in what it described as a “national emergency.” 

 

When I spoke to Christine Yu Moutier, who is the chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, she told me that, in children, “the moment of acute suicidal urge is very short-lived. It’s almost like the brain can’t keep up that rigid state of narrowed cognition for long.” This may explain why access to means is so important; children living in homes with guns have suicide rates more than four times higher than those of other children. 

 

Experts speak of childhood depression as having internalizing symptoms (withdrawal, sadness) that are often ignored and externalizing symptoms (aggression, disruptiveness) that are usually punished. Both can be manifestations of the same underlying illness. 

 

According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Trevor Project, an organization that has worked for more than two decades on suicide prevention among L.G.B.T.Q. youth, some forty-two per cent of this population seriously considered suicide and more than half of trans and nonbinary young people did. 

 

Children have those moments, too, and middle-school drama doesn’t seem silly or insignificant to the children caught up in it. Children’s worlds may be smaller than adults’, but their emotional horizons are just as wide.

Possible Reasons

• The crisis is often attributed to the rise of social media, but solid data on the issue is limited, the findings are nuanced and often contradictory and some adolescents appear to be more vulnerable than others to the effects of screen time. Federal research shows that teenagers as a group are also getting less sleep and exercise and spending less in-person time with friends — all crucial for healthy development — at a period in life when it is typical to test boundaries and explore one’s identity. The combined result for some adolescents is a kind of cognitive implosion: anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, self-harm and even suicide.

• Over the last century, the age of puberty onset has dropped markedly for girls, to 12 years old today from 14 years old in 1990; the age of onset for boys has followed a similar path. Experts say this shift probably now plays a role in the adolescent mental health crisis, although it is just one of many factors that researchers are still working to understand.

• Dr. Pluhar of Harvard noted that “the challenge and the progress” of modern adolescence “is there are so many types of identity” — more choices and possibilities, which in turn could be overwhelming. Among the factors shaping mental health, Dr. Pluhar said, is the mind’s churning and obsessing: “Rumination is a big piece of it."

• M had a name for the main source of their mental health challenges: “Loneliness.”

Honestly, I would not want to be raising kids right now; so many more challenges. But I'll offer just a bit of what I have learned and what I see today.

• I would not get my child a phone before high school (depending on their maturity, maybe in middle school).  Our parents didn't know where we were every minute of the day and you probably don't need to either.  Your child can text from a home computer if you want to know if your child got home.

I say this because it seems that screen time seems a big issue. One child in The NY Times video said during COVID he spent 6 hours a day just playing video games. That can't be good. It might help to ask how much time at school is on a computer and then add in home time with tv/video games/phone. 

• Know what else? No phone at the table - not anyone. Dinnertime, except for days when there are after-school activities - should be sacred. 

• And the phone goes in with a parent at bedtime. That is probably the only way you can know that your child is not getting blue screen light before bed which can interfere with sleep patterns.

• Which brings me to - limiting screen time especially around bedtime.  The hour before bed should be a comedy on tv or a book or meditation - not a screen. 

I'm sure many kids would be very upset over these ideas. But a cell phone is privilege, not a right. Since forever, kids have said, "But Mom, everyone else gets one." "Everyone else has their phone in their room." Don't let that move you. 

Lastly, on suicide. Like school shooters, no one wants to believe their child would do such a thing. But if your child's behavior changes, track that. If they give away treasured items, there's a red flag. If you look on their phone or computer, look at their history. Are there any searches on "how to kill yourself?" 

I wish all of you the best of luck on this journey called parenting.