Marin Voice: The mental health crisis is hitting adolescents hard

An alarming number of adolescents are experiencing significant emotional distress.

Statistics recently reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that 42% of U.S. high schoolers experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021, while 22% seriously considered attempting suicide. This was during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, but the crisis in adolescent emotional health began before the coronavirus.

There has been a continual increase in suicides among adolescents 15-19 years old over the last decade, a jump of 29%. This has implications for mental health support systems and it also has major implications for parents and teachers.

With those statistics in mind, I recently read a New York Times Q&A (“Teens Are Struggling Right Now. What Can Parents Do?,” Feb. 28) sharing the perspective of the adolescent psychologist Lisa Damour and her new book, “The Emotional Life of Adolescents.”

Both the article and the book helped me better understand the problem and the possible ways parents can help. I highly recommend that all parents of adolescent and/or pre-adolescent children read both. Meanwhile, I want to share some ideas I drew from these sources and from my own experience with adolescents.

Damour begins by dispelling three myths about adolescent emotions:

Myth No. 1 – emotion is the enemy of reason. Wrong, we need to see them as joint aspects of an adolescent. Myth No. 2 – difficult emotions are bad for teens. No, they are normal for teens. Myth No. 3 – with their amped-up emotions, teens are psychologically fragile. That’s just not true.

The thrust of Damour’s book is on parental empathy and clarity. She emphasizes that parents need to respect teen emotions and see them as normal, not as a threat. We need to help teens express their feelings and help better manage their emotions.

One chapter focuses on helping them to look at things they’re wrestling with from a different perspective, being able to help them think about their problems with more awareness and less emotion.

Importantly, she also notes, “Too often, ‘mental health’ is equated with feeling good, happy, calm, or relaxed. … This is misguided, … “it’s about having feelings that fit the moment — even if those feelings are unwanted or painful — and managing them in effective ways.”

If, for instance, a couple breaks up, we should expect they will be very sad. This is normal. What is important is how the teenager then goes on to process feelings.

“What we want to see is that they use strategies that bring relief and do no harm, such as talking to people who care about them, finding brief distractions or solving the problem,” Damour wrote.

She also underscores that we need to pay attention to managing our emotions as parents. To be an excellent parent, or teacher, you must have a strong ego, in the best sense of the term.

You need to understand and care about your teen without trying to control them in an effort to fix how you are feeling at the moment. You must be strong enough not to take it personally when your teen is angry at you or doesn’t want to spend time with you. This is vital.

If a parent or teacher takes anger or other forms of rejection personally, it makes it about their feelings not their teen’s.

None of this negates the necessity for discipline. There may need to be consequences for destructive behavior on the part of a teen, but limits placed in the context of a caring open relationship will be far more effective and not seen by the teen as a rejection.

No book can target all contingencies and Damour doesn’t explore how to deal with teens who feel entitled and, especially, ones who appear to show no remorse for destructive acts. But the book strongly implies that if the relationship with the parent is a close and healthy one, it will be easier to address the issue of entitlement and decrease the likelihood of your teenager lacking empathy.

Both the article and the book are well worth the time for parents. They should also be very helpful to teachers in engaging their teenage students.