|
I drive, a lot. I like to be outside, and I like to learn. All these things are so much more enjoyable when accompanied by a podcast. So, you can imagine podcasts are a part of my daily routine.
Once and awhile, I’ll listen to a podcast episode that excites me, motivates me, and makes me wonder if we are doing enough to help children, and I’ve got to share this one with you: Inside the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis
I would love to discuss what this 30 min. episode moved inside you. Please reach out to me if you have a chance to listen, and this motivates you like it did for me. Let’s keep this conversation going!
Some quotes from this episode that really made me think were:
Suicide rates, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007 among this group (youth), leapt nearly 60 percent by 2018. So we started with a basic set of facts. Curiously, this was not the set of facts alone that told us we had something significant to investigate.
Yes. And then, in 2019, this fairly remarkable statement comes out from the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Mental health disorders have surpassed physical conditions,” as the main source of impairment and limitation among adolescents.
Well, explain that. Why is that significant — a few years earlier onset of puberty — to the mental health of young people? So we think of puberty, or we tend to generalize it as something having to do with sex or reproduction, but really, a lot of it’s happening in the brain. That’s where a lot of the action is. The brain is preparing this creature to be aware of social information — in fact, to crave social information as a way of figuring out how to fit in to a much more complex world than the one where the child was cared for. Hierarchy becomes apparent. Competition becomes apparent.
So puberty has been happening earlier, but the rest of the brain has not developed any faster — parts of the brain that help make sense of the information that is suddenly so stimulating.It leaves us at this big idea, I think — recognizing that given the complexity of the world and the early onset of puberty, the mass of information coming at young people, we have to do a better job providing the structure that acts partly as the regulatory function of the young person’s brain.
Cognitive behavioral therapies try to validate that this actually is a real, overwhelming sensibility or feeling or emotion that the adolescent is experiencing. And then, take a variety of steps to help move the adolescent out of that place, so that they can begin to consider other options, to consider different coping mechanisms that are less self-destructive, and to ultimately understand that in fact, they were overwhelmed, that this was a temporary state, and that they can come out the other side of it a more reasoning person, someone who can make sense of this intense emotion that they’re experiencing.
This is the line that got me thinking the most:
I want to give you my chief reason for hope. Could you imagine if people started to have a teen-life crisis instead of a midlife crisis? Meaning, they learn to cope with difficult emotions and decisions and opportunities and choices earlier on in life, whether that might create a runway for a richer healthier life going forward. Like, there’s an opportunity here.
| 
/alicia-predator-split-083022-b05c71ddd6ad4cfdb414be6a336afc5e.jpg)
