Terrible toll of the pressure to be PERFECT
From an author whose life fell apart in her drive not to be thought ‘just average’, a shattering insight into the epidemic of mental illness among young women today
There’s a word feared by young women today. It has nothing to do with appearance, intelligence, wit or sex appeal. No — it’s being described as ‘ordinary’.
In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a woman. As the anniversary celebrations reminded us, we were granted the vote just 100 years ago.
Nowadays, girls grow up knowing they can have careers as full and impressive as those of their male counterparts. The recent campaigning around the salaries of high-profile media women — TV presenters and actresses — suggests that, finally, equal pay may become reality. These are great, important strides: no young woman wants to return to the days when female lives were mapped from birth, characterised by limited choice and little power.
Yet talking to 70 young women about their experiences of mental illness for my latest book has shown me that life is not always easy for women of my generation. The opportunities available to us may have expanded in ways we could not have imagined a century ago, but girlhood today is complex and fraught. I’m not the only young woman who has found it at best challenging and at worst agonising.
In this population especially, the mental health crisis looms large.
Put simply, women are more vulnerable than young men to many mental health conditions and, with research suggesting 75 per cent of these problems are established by the age of 24, they are particularly susceptible during young adulthood.
According to the latest survey by the respected Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey (APMs), which has been conducted every seven years since 1993, all types of common mental health problems, including depression and generalised anxiety disorder, are more prevalent in women than in men, with the discrepancy most marked among young people: 26 per cent of women aged 16–24 report symptoms of
a common mental health problem, compared to just 9.1 per cent of men of the same age.
Today’s young women may be more inclined to voice their struggles than male counterparts, but this alone cannot explain away the widening gap. The female mental illness crisis is born out of a world that subjects young women to particular pressures.
Girls are growing up in a culture that prizes achievement over contentment and promotes only those at the top of their fields as role models. When we can’t — or don’t want to — meet these impossibly high standards, we feel like failures.
It is a ‘striving’ culture, instilled in girls from school onwards and exacerbated by the endless empty boasting on social media, that makes us think if we always try just that little bit harder, we can always do that little bit better.
Today’s young women are bombarded with well-meaning messages — at school, from parents and online. We are exhorted to ‘reach for the stars’, told there is nothing we cannot achieve — if only we try hard enough.
But ‘be anything you want to be’ is a misleading mantra, failing to acknowledge that ability and energy have ceilings and dreams may not be achieved for reasons other than personal failure or lack of hard work.
Such conflicts and pressures feed into a fear I notice strongly in my generation: that of being ‘average’. The notion that we should all try to steer as far away from the middle ground as possible has always struck me as problematic, because it is a logical impossibility: by definition, the majority of people have to cluster around the mid-point and this is a perfectly good place to be.
Yet now more than ever, young people struggle to cope when they encounter limitations — intellectual, financial or physical — because they have never been taught to make peace with imperfection.
For women in particular, positive messages about potential are in conflict with the implicit societal messages that still abound: that, in addition to being brave and determined, we should be beautiful and wellgroomed if we want success.
That we should expect to expend the same effort as men in the workplace and still often receive less in the way of payment and recognition.
I’m 24 and I have lived with mental health issues, in part triggered by the constant striving for perfection, since I was 11.
My growing anxieties timed with moving from primary to secondary school — a transition that I, like many others, found hard. Where my primary school was warm and nurturing, my senior school fostered a perfectionist ethos that was impossible to live up to.
A sensitive child, I was keen to get things right, but at school, I could only get things wrong.
When I was 12, soon after starting Year 7, a teacher refused to mark my English homework because I had gone over the word limit.
Incidents such as this were small, but they stacked up, and I came to feel I could never be as clever or academically successful as I ought to be. I had to find another way to achieve.
That became losing weight — and I was good at it.
As is typical in the development of an eating disorder — and many other mental illnesses — my behaviour became increasingly extreme and my thoughts increasingly self-punishing, until I was in crisis.
From 13, I spent more time in hospital than in school. I was sometimes anorexic, sometimes bulimic — but always lonely and ashamed. My first book, about living with this pernicious mindset, was published when I was 21 and, shortly afterwards, I started a psychology degree at Oxford university. From the outside, things had improved dramatically — but internally, I struggled still and, after a term at university, I unravelled. I was admitted to hospital and advised to take time away from my studies. I felt I was no better than I had been as a child, when anorexia made me hopeless, and I hated the feeling that I was falling further behind my peers.
This most recent experience of personal crisis left me wanting to shine a light on the dingy corners of the mind that are rarely illuminated, to find out more about mental illness in women of my generation.
I wondered how many other women were, on the surface, coping well, but underneath felt close to despair.
During my time away from university, I met and interviewed 70 women aged between 16 and 25 about their experiences. I wanted to illustrate the broad pressures affecting our lives, so they came from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures.
Some were at school, some at university and some working. What struck me was that all were desperately, relentlessly striving — for professional success, for recognition, for internal or external goals. When striving becomes an endeavour in and of itself, one becomes self-critical and anxious, never able to pause and appreciate what one has already achieved.
This is not healthy. Pushing harder and harder is a recipe for discontent, not happiness.
Indeed, the very notion of contentment is a foreign one to my generation, as we fear we will never find adequately paid work or own our own homes.
There is a feeling among young women that we should always be moving on to the next — better — thing, afraid that if we pause to rest for a moment, we will be left behind.
If this culture has produced a lucky subset of young people who thrive on ambition, it has yielded many more who are phobic about failure, who feel chronically insufficient and who suffer from imposter syndrome. This insecurity sets the stage perfectly for mental illness to flourish.
Another striking theme I noticed was that some women do not have grand ambitions, but are afraid to admit this publicly. In previous generations, women may have felt uncomfortable admitting a desire for a
high-flying career — women with professional-level jobs were in the minority.
But now, those who do not aspire to professional renown — perhaps their priority is to raise a family — can feel ashamed, as if smaller-scale goals indicate ingratitude or failure.
another of the book’s characters, rosie, fears that without the delusions of grandeur her manic episodes bring her, she would be an unremarkable person living an unremarkable life — and this would be intolerable.
this is part of the culture that values achievement above all else: women feel they should not be aiming to achieve what will make them happy, but what will make them impressive.
the women I spoke to frequently used the word ‘ordinary’ as if it meant ‘awful’ or ‘disgusting’ — the worst thing that you could possibly be.
this damaging mindset is certainly aggravated by the huge amounts of social media we now consume on a daily basis.
Why would one want to be ordinary when the online world has made it so acceptable to show off in a way one would not dream of doing face to face?
On some level, we are all well aware people put a glossy spin on their social media life, but it is still difficult not to draw constant comparisons — and find yourself lacking. there is a line between personal pride and public boasting: a line that social media has played a part in blurring.
researching for this book showed me there is a correlation between mental illness and level of social media use and I have adjusted my views on platforms such as youtube and Instagram from neutral to negative.
So often in my interviews, social media use preceded self-destructive behaviour, with women seeking solace in internet communities, but emerging lonelier — and more full of self-hatred — than ever.
For those already affected by mental illness, such as eating disorders, there are so-called ‘pro-recovery’ communities, particularly on Instagram.
While I am sure there are instances in which young people find these communities a force for good, they also encourage total obsession with whatever illness users share, with those most severely affected occupying a position at the top of the social hierarchy.
OUtWardly, such groups promote recovery — but they offer subtle reinforcements for remaining unwell. they are cosy, supportive and exclusive and one cannot forget that one gained access by being unwell.
the obvious inference is that, if one were to become well, one would no longer be welcome within the group.
and why would one want to leave when the group offers round-the-clock care and concern from faceless ‘friends’?
So, what can parents do? limiting screentime and asking that devices be left downstairs overnight are to be encouraged, as is talking to children about the artificial nature of the glossy lives that social media personalities appear to lead.
But, from my own experience with mental illness, the best thing a parent can do is just ‘be there’. they don’t have to have magic solutions, but just the patience to listen.
While I would not describe myself as having overcome my own struggle with perfection entirely, mental illness now occupies a smaller part of my life than it once did — and this was also true of many of the women I interviewed.
Psychological disorders are persistent and exhausting, but — in the vast majority of cases — over time, they will shrink and quieten.
Perhaps the most heartening lesson I learned was that almost all the young women feel they have grown stronger and more sensitive from having suffered a mental illness and are grateful for the self-insight they have gained.
But writing the book also made me see that the scale of psychological distress among young women is vast — and must be acknowledged as a public health crisis.
tackling this crisis is a huge and complex issue, with implications for Government and NhS policy.
But what may also help young women, even if just in a small way, is very simple.
It’s to remember that it’s Ok to be ordinary, to ‘just be’.
NANCY TUCKER is the author of That Was When People Started To Worry: Windows Into Unwell Minds (Icon Books, £14.99).