Crisis. Fatalism. Overwhelming.
Some experts say this is how the current national discussion about youth mental health is framed — and despite its aims, that perspective is undermining young people’s ability to find solutions to help them navigate mental health issues.
They were speaking at a media briefing on youth mental health hosted by the Frameworks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.
Nat Kendall Taylor, CEO of the Frameworks Institute and a psychological anthropologist, says one of the biggest challenges to creating communities with better overall youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about.
Conversations tend to focus on how students’ individual choices affect their mental health, rather than on systemic issues and how the environments teenagers live in contribute to stress among young people, Kendall-Taylor said. They also tend to be fatalistic, focusing on the crisis nature of the problem and treating teenagers as kind of “Other” Social Groups It is separate from their community.
These factors form a “toxic trio” that makes people feel like the problem is insurmountable and so they ignore it, he explains, making it hard to get people to buy into change and access public resources to support teen mental health.
“This is a culture war issue, it’s become an existential issue,” Kendall Taylor said, “and what’s interesting is that the narrative that focuses on crisis and urgency leaves no room for solutions.”
What drives the adolescent brain?
Andrew Furini is a professor of psychology and director of the Youth Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The science behind the adolescent brain is very different than it was a decade ago, he says, and what the teen brain needs is connection, discovery and exploration: The motivation and reward systems are hyperactive, releasing higher levels of dopamine than those seen in childhood or adulthood.
“It energizes our motivational domain and allows us to explore the world and find out how we fit in, not just with our family but with society, our community and so on,” Furini says. “We are hardwired to take risks and learn during adolescence. Taking risks in a safe and supportive way is important for adolescents to discover how they can contribute to the world around them, whether at school or in their community.”
Furini says the public still underestimates how crucial sleep is for brain development and for adolescent mental health, explaining that current evidence shows a much stronger connection between good sleep and mental health than another factor often cited as the underlying problem: social media use.
“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media is distracting people from other important factors that may be causing this,” Fuligni says.
But teens can’t always control whether their environment is conducive to a good night’s sleep, Fuligni said. The amount of noise and light pollution there is, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that affect whether teens get enough rest.
“Sleep also points to some very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When you look at economic disparities, when you look at ethnic disparities, sleep is going to be attached to every dimension of inequality across the country. When you look at light pollution, overcrowding, parents’ work schedules, all of these things are going to reduce the quality of sleep in the home.”
Changing the narrative
Kendall Taylor says one solution proposed by the Framework Institute is Recommendation To address the decline in public attention to young people’s mental health, it’s important to shift from framing it as an individual issue to one that focuses on how our environments shape us.
Educating people about how adolescent development works is key to gaining buy-in to address issues that improve young people’s well-being, he added. Similarly, we need to shift the conversation around youth mental health from crisis to solutions and have more conversations about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.
“We need to be careful to ensure that the young people in our stories are active agents in their mental health experiences, not passive recipients,” says Kendall-Taylor, “and not fall into the trap we often fall into: the dynamic of ‘they need us to save them.'”
School district perspective
Kent Pekel has long thought about how stress on young people’s mental health is hindering students’ success in class. As superintendent of schools in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system, encouraging high school students to get more sleep, and Classes start at 8:50 a.m..
Before the change, the school district tried to convince high school students to go to bed earlier by promoting the “benefits of sleep,” but the campaign was unsuccessful.
“The benefits of sleep have not been well received by high school students,” Pekel says, “but recently we have started talking about health and wellness as part of our mental health strategy.”
Pekel says she feels like we’re in the midst of the second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the move to implement early childhood education across the entire system, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.
Pekel says that framing the importance of early childhood education in the same way that Kendall Taylor did about adolescent mental health has helped make it more widely accepted, adding that when it comes to mental health, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even larger than what families faced when the early childhood education movement first began.
While it’s good that today’s students, parents and educators are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel believes more families are willing to keep their children home if they have anxiety symptoms. He said his district, like other schools across the country, has a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help discerning whether students are truly suffering from mental health issues or simply teenage issues.
“Not being able to attend school can have a devastating effect on their ability to learn, and parents are using language that suggests it’s actually rooted in a mental health issue,” Pekel says. “And sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this child just needs a lot of support to attend class.'”
