How anxiety has frozen a generation
Throw together a pandemic, cost of living and housing crises and climate change – along with online trolls – and you get a ‘‘tsunami’’ of anxious young adults. Joanne Naish reports.
Imagine the feeling you get just before you step on to a rollercoaster: the beads of sweat, the dry mouth, the rapidly beating heart and sick feeling in your stomach. Now imagine that happening regularly in your day-today life.
Lochie Cowles was already feeling overwhelmed with his school workload, school politics, performing arts and activism when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
He had spent countless hours preparing for the lead role in his high school musical, only to have the massive disappointment of being sent into lockdown during final rehearsals and the performance cancelled.
‘‘I felt very isolated in lockdown. ‘‘How I learn best is with other people in collaboration. Having to do everything by myself was a struggle. ‘‘It was a lot of pressure,’’ he said. The lockdown and uncertainty over how Covid was affecting the future exacerbated feelings of anxiety Cowles has experienced over big issues such as the climate change, housing and cost of living crises.
‘‘It is difficult to describe. I feel external fears over things you can’t control. Knowing that the world is going to crap – I don’t think it ever goes away.’’
Having a keen interest in politics, Cowles, now 20, worries about the future and feels helpless. ‘‘Something happens overseas like Roe v Wade being overturned and I feel like I should do something about this but from the other side of the globe, what can I do that will make a difference?’’
He felt unable to continue with his plans for studying political science at university. ‘‘It was the stress of year 13, especially with Covid. It just meant I didn’t feel like it was something I was up to doing,’’ he said.
Deciding to ask for help, things turned around after he got some free counselling sessions through Mike King’s charity, I Am Hope.
‘‘For me, it was having someone I could speak to completely external from my life. They gave me really good advice and coping mechanisms but the biggest thing was having someone to listen.’’
Andrew Lessells, from the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations, said anxiety was ‘‘a crisis bubbling away’’ and Covid had created huge barriers.
‘‘Covid has changed how we interact – we can’t learn together in a lecture hall and engage in clubs and socialise on campus, all the normal stuff that students usually do.
‘‘And on top of that we had the job losses through Covid and people can’t afford to live. That increases the stress and pressure on people.’’
Lessells said there had been increasing recognition of such issues from the Government, which had put $25 million into mental health support for students. But he said that support was ‘‘not nearly enough’’, and that between 20% and 40% of people who started a year did not finish, depending on the course.
‘‘There is a whole heap of unrecognised anxiety bubbling away, and lots and lots of people are dropping out.
‘‘There is no research done on why but we believe anxiety and stress is a major part of that.’’
Re-engaging with the world after three years of public health messaging about the need for social distancing and bubbles was a real challenge to move past, he said.
So what is anxiety?
Queenstown’s Whakatipu Youth Trust manager and youth counsellor Leah Sellwood said anxiety was a useful mechanism that everyone had that acted like a fire alarm.
For some people, that warning system went into overdrive and got triggered in certain situations that might not bother other people.
‘‘You feel anxious when something does not feel right, like butterflies in your stomach show up before you get on a rollercoaster.
‘‘You think of all the bad things that can happen.’’
She said people tried to escape those feelings by withdrawing from schooling, work or distracting themselves with substance abuse.
‘‘They stay at home because they feel safe there,’’ she said.
However, withdrawing only fed anxiety because it meant it was more difficult to re-engage in social settings again. If left unchecked, anxiety could lead to other mental health conditions and depression.
Sellwood said the solutions were different for different people but in general she helped people regulate their anxiety by figuring out when it happened and what their triggers were. In the end, they needed support to ‘‘sit with those feelings and accept them with kindness and compassion’’ so that eventually they faded away.
Rosalind Turner, a Dunedin psychologist who works in youth services, said there had been about a 50% increase in instances of young people presenting with mental health difficulties since the Covid-19 lockdowns. ‘‘We have had this tsunami of referrals through and Covid just exacerbated what had been the trajectory anyway.’’
She said getting through anxiety was about the basics – sleeping and eating well, getting fresh air and spending time with friends.
‘‘All those simple things make a huge difference but get forgotten if you are spending 90% of your time with your head in a phone going down that rabbit hole.’’
She railed against the idea that the younger generation were too soft or had been wrapped in cotton wool – a concept encapsulated by the derogatory term ‘‘snowflake generation’’.
‘‘It is a different world. You can read the news and find out what is happening across the world in real time; there are horrible things posted up on YouTube; somebody can react to you momentarily on Instagram or Snapchat, and those are very real challenges for young people that they face all the time – it is a constant kind of stress.
‘‘You have to empathise with how things are for them at the moment.’’
Ministry of Youth Development acting director Dibs Patel said the department had invested more than $13m in the year to June 30 in programmes to support about 67,000 young people to succeed, increase their social connections, build resilience and enjoy life.
‘‘Demand for quality youth development services has increased over the last few years and reflects the impacts of Covid,’’ he said.
A Ministry of Health spokesperson said there was no doubt the pandemic and other pressures had affected some people’s wellbeing, but the majority were ‘‘holding up well’’. Free primary mental health and addiction services were being rolled out through the Access and Choice programme, which had provided more than 400,000 free wellbeing sessions since 2019.
Adell Cox, chairperson of Te Hau Toka Southern Lakes Wellbeing Group and a psychologist specialising in children and youth, said there was more funding and more services than ever before.
Most importantly, there were more open conversations than ever before. ‘‘People coming out and talking about their depression – the visibility and awareness has been raised – that is a good outcome.’’
Jenny Keoghan, an adviser at WestREAP, the Westland Rural Education Activities Programme, helps young people transition from school into employment or training on the West Coast. Since the service began at the start of the year it had identified 40 young people not in education, employment or training, in the Grey and Westland districts.
The majority of those were dealing with some form of mental health difficulties, mainly anxiety.
‘‘We have opened a can of worms. ‘‘I am sure there are more out there; if we started advertising, we would be inundated with phone calls,’’ Keoghan said.
‘‘Anxiety is very much a reality and is a huge barrier to not only education and employment but to actually accessing services that are there to help.’’
Employers needed, without passing judgment, to give young people the opportunity and time to prove themselves and become confident in what they were doing, she added.
For Lochie Cowles, the support of the counsellor as well as those around him has been key.
His father paid for more counselling sessions when he had used up his free allocation, a gesture he said was ‘‘really nice’’ and supportive.
He has now found a job in sales that he loves, with a supportive employer, allowing him to save up for study if that is a path he wants to go down in the future.
‘‘I am lucky with the management team I have that I can message them and say I need a mental health day, and they will say: ‘OK, I’ll see you tomorrow’, and they will check in with me to make sure I am OK.
‘‘[Mental health] is de-stigmatised a lot more than ever it was in the past.’’