It seems many parents want schools to do more in this space, which makes sense, because mental health issues only get worse when kids grow up without support.
The question isn’t just about making therapy available to more people, though that is important. It’s also about eliminating the environmental factors that cause harm to our mental health. Those will vary depending on where we live. What works in Louisiana is not what works in New York. What is needed here is different because the environment is different.
Most of all, can we even see the issues as they apply to different places? If we can’t see that, how do we see the problems faced by any individual?
Social media is easy to target, but it’s not likely the most effective change to make for the benefit of youth mental health. The others take more work and get fewer headlines, so here we are.
I suspect that he is on to something. It’s hard to create a community of people caring for one another when our workplaces demand constant availability, and our culture rewards people who are singularly focused on career or commercial success. This reminds me of something I wrote about early risers and their productivity a few years ago. I thought it was weird that in a profile of these “very successful” men, every one of them talked about getting up early to start working, planning out their days, sending emails to their team so they’d be waiting for them when they got to the office, etc.
What was missing from every single person interviewed in the story? There was no mention of a family. None of these men talked about having breakfast with a spouse, taking their kids to school, etc. None of them mentioned having friends. Their entire goal was to get a head start on work so they could get ahead. And here we were, writing glowing profiles and encouraging everyone to live like this.
For some people dealing with anxiety and depression, more exercise or time in nature might help. For a cross-country athlete, I doubt that is what they are lacking. The comments from the researchers in the article above made it clear to me that there are a multitude of reasons why the rate among student-athletes has been getting higher. That means the solutions are likely to include various options as well.
That’s not a bad thing. It just means we have to find what works best for us individually.
As I’ve repeatedly said, find what works for you and stick with it. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise or convince you to stop doing something that works for you. Don’t give up if what your friend or an online influencer does that works for them doesn’t work for you. Every one of these lives is worth the effort to find what will make them want to stay. That includes you.
What we need as individuals and what we need on a given day can vary. If we know ourselves, though, we can use the mental health tools we have, including a day off, to our best advantage.
