Opinion: What Gen Z teens like me are getting wrong about mental health

What worries me is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort.

I grew up with a mom who’s a therapist, which meant that feelings moved through the air in our home like oxygen. It’s not that we talked about feelings all the time, or that I’d say something about my day and she’d ask, “How do you feel about that?”

Instead, it was more that no matter what I felt — sad, worried, mad, confused, lonely, whatever — it was never something to fix or make disappear. The world didn’t stop when I was unhappy or uncomfortable. It was never a big deal. I’d just have to feel whatever I felt — good or bad — and that, my mom believed, was the key to emotional health.

But this isn’t what I saw in many of my friends’ families. Ironically, it was homes with no therapists in them where feelings were constantly monitored. If friends were upset that a teacher gave them a bad grade, or they were left out of a social event, their parents would spring into action. First, they’d try to fix it — by talking to the teacher, or calling another parent — and if that didn’t work, they’d try to cheer up their kids by letting them have extra screen time or distracting them with a trip to the mall or allowing them to take off for what schools started calling a mental health day.

In my house, discomfort wasn’t just OK, it was encouraged. We talked about coping with difficult feelings, not avoiding them or trying to make them go away with screen time, the food court or parental involvement. My mom’s view was almost existential: Life is hard, and there’s no way around that. But if you can get comfortable with discomfort, she told me, you’ll be a more emotionally resilient person. If something upsetting happened to me, her typical response wasn’t, “That’s terrible! Let’s figure out what to do!” She’d say, “I understand why you’re upset” or just, “I’m sorry, and I’m here.” She’d sit and listen and hear me out, but then we’d go on with our days.

“I want you to be comfortable with discomfort,” my mom once said. It confused me at first, but then I understood: Because I’m OK with discomfort, I don’t fall apart when life gets, well, uncomfortable.

Ever since the surgeon general sounded the alarm on youth mental health in 2021, parents and educators have been trying to figure out how to help teens in my generation who are struggling amid rising rates of depression and anxiety. That’s an understandable goal. What worries me, though, is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort, to the point that the term “mental health” is becoming so diluted that it’s starting to lose meaning.

Social media play a large role in this, promoting pseudo-technical and pathologizing language — often leading to cancellation — as the antidote to emotional discomfort. Someone disagrees with you? They’re “gaslighting” you! Someone has the “wrong” point of view or perspective?

I wonder if, more broadly, we’re normalizing an almost hyper-vigilant avoidance of anything uncomfortable. By insisting that the mere mention of something difficult is bad for our mental health, are we protecting ourselves from emotional damage — or damaging ourselves emotionally? Are we really that emotionally fragile, or are we teaching ourselves to become more fragile than we actually are?

Now, as a teenager, I appreciate that my mom didn’t always try to smooth things out for me. It taught me that rather than avoiding something uncomfortable, it’s often healthier to face it and see what happens. If we’re to fully promote mental health, discomfort should be part of its definition.

Zach Gottlieb is the 17-year-old founder of Talk With Zach and a high school student in Los Angeles. ©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.