Skills or Pills?
The increase in young adults reportedly suffering from anxiety and low moods has been noticeable in the last decade - why? - and what skills can they develop to ease this, rather than medicating?
‘I think I’ve been pretty brilliant this year’ - one of our male students just before handing in for assessment.
Three days before he’d been constantly seeking reassurance. Daily conversations about his work, his future career and if he was ‘good enough’. Might sound like a general one off, but this year, I’ve noticed a lot more students suffering from these extreme highs and lows.
Bravado in front of friends - then being unable to look me in the eye when they hand-in their work, and falling apart behind the scenes.
This isn’t just at assessment time - this is on a daily basis. I was shocked when I discovered the majority of one group I work with are all taking some form of mental health medication, (often over the course of years if not decades) and have some label, whether self-diagnosed or ‘official’. These are people in their late teens and early twenties!
The problem
When they are feeling low, or unable to cope with the (let’s face it, pretty minor in the big picture of things) demands of University, they often trundle off to our student services - returning with advice to seek medication from their doctor and a new label for what they are feeling.
I don’t get through a day without someone telling me - quite happily in front of everyone, what they have been diagnosed with and asking for particular exemptions from specific elements of their course. One even asked his internship employer if he could work from home as his social anxiety was ‘off the charts’ that week. They have been taught that oscillating moods (which they’ve had since surprise, surprise, puberty) is a problem.
That having any kind of low points, or negative feelings means you must seek professional help and be exempt from day to day life. Certainly, if they reach life-sabotaging proportions it can mean that. Mostly though it’s just a case of being an individual human being!
Sometimes we suffer more from our perception of those negative feelings, than from the actual feelings themselves. I had a student tell me he had been put on anti-anxiety meds for a year - after ‘feeling a bit down leaving his family after a recent bereavement, and coming back to University’.
So what’s going on?
From school onwards young people are taught not what we hope - the core basics and actual life skills they’ll need. No, they have their heads filled with the usual fear porn. At the moment, war, climate, cost of living, more potential ‘pandemics’, views that don’t echo theirs, entitlement, ‘fascists’ - all high on their radar.
I witness education steering this on a daily basis. Add social media, peer pressure, access to porn from a very young age, digital coercion and more, and you have a pot bubbling away ready to boil over.
By the time they reach Higher Education they are a shell of the happy child that should have been carefree. Childhoods that many took for granted until the mid 90’s.
How do we solve it?
There is no quick fix I don’t think - but of course there are skills that can be put in place way before any of our systems attempt to take control and coerce.
Young people don’t have the experiences older adults do, that can help them navigate tricky life issues. Wisdom is just an echo of experience, and when you can draw from that you are comforted. Young people don’t have a whole load of experience. Everything seems important and serious.
Give them a good family base - they know that whatever happens they can always ‘come home’. This might include grandparents, aunts, uncles or just their immediate small family - but knowing they have something there no matter what, really helps give them the confidence to make mistakes.
Don’t compare them to siblings. The amount of students we have that have some sort of issue as they are trying to live up to an older sister or brother is astronomical!
Let them make mistakes, and don’t pull them up on it every time (unless it’s dangerous of course!) They have to learn - mess up, embarrass themselves, fail - to be able to gain the important lessons it teaches us when we do.
Get them cooking - having the confidence to know they can look after themselves - and others - with the basics of making a home-cooked meal, is brilliant.
Get them in to moving from an early age. Running, swimming, walking, playing outside - less sitting indoors and watching their screens / looking at their phones. The statistics for a rise in various diseases and ailments from thirties onwards are horrifying - often caused by obesity, lack of mobility and vitamin D, and poor diet. The rise in mental health issues is also equally worrying.
This in particular is aimed at young men - let them be young men! They have so much energy to burn off - I notice the difference in my friend’s daughters compared to our nephew. Boys are often a little bit more forceful in their play.
They are sometimes less interested in the long, self reflective process in school. The system we currently have set up for them doesn’t work - we assess throughout the year and base it on self-reflection alongside the work they have produced rather than deadlines, fast work and competition. The kind of system our male students prefer. I’m not saying all our female students don’t - but they are often better suited to the current all year round testing and observation, and struggle more with a hard, quick, deadline.
Where I work, I see a noticeable difference in young male students compared to even 6 or 7 years ago. They have been silenced. Tying themselves in knots to make sure they say and do the right things while fighting against their natural instincts and behaviours. Anything that is considered a ‘male trait’ is branded as toxic - with no level of nuance, or discussion.
Home educate if you can. This seems to make a huge difference. I am noticing more coming in to the university system that have been - and they are focused, balanced, prepared and independent. The mainstream system hasn’t managed to coach them, and get them to buy in to their agendas.
Finally - this might be worth reading for some parents / tutors -
‘The Twentysomething Treatment’ - by Dr Meg Jay.
‘The Twentysomething Treatment is a book that offers help and hope to millions of young adults—and to the friends, parents, partners, teachers, and mentors who care about them—just when they need it the most. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to find out how to improve our mental health by improving how we handle the uncertainties of life.’
In the book she discusses;
* How to think less about “what if” and more about “what is.”
* How to feel uncertain without coming undone.
* How to work—at work—toward competence and calm.
* How to befriend someone and why this is more crucial for survival than ever.
* How to move, literally, toward happiness and health.
* How to cook your way into confidence and connection.
* How to change a bad habit you may not know you have.
* How to decide when so much about life is undecided.
* How to choose purpose at work and in love.
A good thing to start considering - even if your children or students are still very young. Laying the groundwork now for a more stable young adult in the future, not reliant on pills, is a no-brainer!
For paying subscribers there’s also this workshop in getting our young people outdoors and moving more.
Thanks as always for reading - have a great weekend and I’ll see you here next week! 😊