10 simple ways to help our young people’s worsening mental health
The mental health crisis in Ireland feels overwhelming, but there are tentative solutions, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
THE largest ever study of young people’s mental health in Ireland has recorded another steep rise in anxiety and depression. Severe anxiety among teenagers has doubled from 11pc to 22pc since 2012. In young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, one in four is struggling. Girls, in particular, were said to be reporting high levels of stress and poor self-esteem.
It’s easy to dismiss young people as “snowflakes” unable to cope with life’s pressures, but it’s clear that deteriorating mental health presents a growing social, as well as a personal, challenge. What exactly can be done to put this dark tide into reverse? There are no quick fixes, but there are some things that young people can do to protect themselves.
1
Unlike hippies in California in the 1960s, today’s teenagers don’t need psychedelic substances to detach themselves from the world around them. They have access to the most powerful psychedelic stimulants ever created — screens. Heads bent permanently to these devices, so-called ‘screenagers’ are fed a relentless diet of distraction and entertainment that leaves them little room to develop self-reliance and resilience. Learning how to turn off for extended periods may prove as hard for many as quitting drugs, but it’s the only way to tune back into the real, as opposed to virtual, world.
2
If that’s asking too much, at least switch off social media for a while. Students in New York, who recently took part in an experiment to ditch their mobile phones for a week, reported that they “felt refreshed, happier, more focused, and more relaxed”, and a large part of that came from not having to deal with the invasion of social media into their daily lives. The relentless pressure to get “likes” feeds into the need to seek the approval of other people, so your happiness becomes bound up with some superficial, passing popularity. Exposing oneself to random strangers’ greater attractiveness or favourability, even if it is artificial, is ultimately fatal to self-esteem. Someone else will always be prettier or more successful. It’s not as if young people don’t know that either. In a survey last year, 41pc said social media made them depressed or anxious.
3
The standard put-down to anyone who’s making a fuss over something that’s pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things is to tell them they “need to get out more”. Actually, it’s not bad advice. The mental health charity Mind advises that spending time in the open air reduces stress, increases relaxation, improves mood, and even boosts self-esteem. It could be that being in the natural world neutralises the relentless negativity that comes from being trapped with just your own thoughts and those demon screens for company.
Hippies had that right, at least. Hug a tree.
4
Studies have consistently found that laughter therapy lifts low mood and, crucially, improves sleep, because no one is getting enough of that. Scientists have even discovered that laughing changes the brain’s chemistry in ways that can “effectively counteract depressive symptoms”. The world can seem like a black place, but not everything deserves to be treated with the same level of seriousness. Some things in life, maybe most things, are just ridiculous, and, while it’s important not to make the mistake of telling people suffering to just pull themselves together and lighten up, laughing regularly has undoubted beneficial effects.
5
People are increasingly unable to cope with those who think differently about various social, political or personal issues. They regard such individuals as not merely wrong about certain matters, but bad. It’s one of the most disturbing developments in modern life, and surely can’t be divorced from the pernicious influence of internet culture, which reinforces groupthink and the urge to punish and alienate outsiders.
There may be no solution in the short term to this increasingly fractious public environment, but being aware that this hostility is manufactured, not natural, is one place to start. Dividing the world into Allies and Enemies leads to mental anguish. Most people are perfectly decent, even the ones who don’t agree with you. Developing a fool intolerance works wonders.
6
You are what you eat. A Spanish study tracked the eating habits of 8,964 people, and found, unsurprisingly, that there was a link between junk food and depression. In fact, those who regularly ate high fat, high calorie, high sugar processed food were 37pc more likely to suffer poor mental health over a six-year period than those with the lowest consumption. It’s not possible to isolate poor mental health to one single factor, but it certainly suits those who get rich from peddling nutrition-free rubbish which leads their customers to get depressed, because then they’re more likely to self-medicate with comfort eating. We shouldn’t make it so easy for them.
7
If there’s one thing of which there’s no shortage in the literature of mental health issues, it’s academic studies. Another one, not unrelated to the last, found a direct correlation between increased anxiety and looking at pictures of expensive objects such as cars and jewellery and electronic devices. The consumerist culture needs people to feel dissatisfied with their lives so that they continually want to buy new things. When they can’t get them, they feel unhappy, but, when they do get them, they also feel unhappy because it doesn’t fill the spiritual void at the heart of modern life.
Today we own more
“things” than any previous generation, but it’s the least materialistic people who report being happiest.
8
These days the so-called “hookup culture” of casual sex and one-night stands has become ubiquitous, yet, while young people who go along with it report feeling empowered and desirable in the moment, the American Psychological Association says that the promise of readily available sex without emotional complications “may leave more strings attached than many participants might first assume”. Afterwards they frequently experience regret, guilt, embarrassment and low self-esteem. Those who were not depressed or lonely beforehand start to feel so subsequently. To warn against this culture risks being condemned as a prudish moralist, but a world in which personal relationships are reduced to a series of meaningless encounters with partners that you barely know, fosters a utilitarian view of other human beings that is bound to affect your sense of self-worth. If they don’t matter, why should you?
9
Bad habits are actions you do repeatedly, even while knowing that they’re bad for you. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that anxiety is a bad habit in the exact same way. Sufferers can’t imagine not being anxious because it becomes their life, and are afraid of changing because habits are addictive. The only thing that can break a bad habit is replacing it with a good habit, or at least a different habit. It’s hard to muster the energy or enthusiasm for trying something new when you’re at a low ebb, but, as Einstein is often credited (wrongly) with saying: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
10
Woody Allen put it best: “The only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies, and deceive yourself. One must have one’s delusions to live. If you look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable.” Young people don’t like taking advice from their elders. Anyone older than 30 is likely to be met with a dismissive sigh of “OK, boomer” when they start to speak, but the collective experience of thousands of years of civilisation shouldn’t be so readily dismissed. Above all else, dive into the art of the past, because it’s all there. Paying attention only to what came along in one’s own lifetime is a one-way ticket to nihilism.