Mental Health and teenagers
Written by Dr. Namrata GR Raut
GetMagic is a wonderful platform that provides resources to the young girls in middle and high school,, who want to pursue their career in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) area. It is a unique opportunity where a mentee is matched with a mentor and they run research in 12–14 weeks and showcase their project at the final event. The discrepancies in the number between men and women in the field of science and technology can be addressed by fostering the young minds in the field of STEM which is the main motto of the GetMagic. I have been associated with GetMagic for two years now and this session was very informative for me. When I met my very motivated mentee for my summer session this year with GetMagic, I began to learn a lot from her perspectives. Mental health is often frowned upon and isn’t addressed properly. Mental health is a challenge for adults on many levels and when I learned that teenagers also suffer from mental problems at a different level it was informative. My mentee Meera and I had 12 weeks to complete our project. We browsed many articles on PubMed and Google Scholar like, “Opportunities for Research in Mental Health Emergencies: Executive Summary and methodology”, by Michael P. Wilson et. al (2019), “The relationship between physical and mental health: A meditation analysis”, by Julius Ohrnberger et. al. (2017) and “Mental health: early intervention and prevention in children and young people”, by Heather Membride (2016) helped us to design our research study to conduct in 12 weeks. It helped us to formulate the Institutional review board (IRB) questionnaire that we sent out in the fifth week of our meetings. An IRB is an institute’s committee with the responsibility to review that institution’s research projects involving human subjects, primarily to assure the protection of the safety, rights, and welfare of the human subjects. And as teenagers were our subjects, we had to get our IRB approved by the school. IRB approval from the school board took a couple of weeks, as we had to be very cautious with the wording and responses choices that we provided. This was even trickier as we were dealing with teenagers.
Once we sent the IRB questionnaire out, students had a couple of weeks to respond. That was done by week 8 and the responses we received had to be analyzed before presenting at our final presentation at the GetMagic event at the end of the summer. Some of the responses that we got from our open-ended questions were thought-provoking. The most common response that we got were, teenagers are labeled as lazy or slackers when they are not doing the day-day chores and parents ignore the underlying cause. Few even responded that, “when I was younger I thought a lot of things that are considered abuse were ok”. And the majority agreed on talking about mental health is still considered taboo. Some of the teenagers also hinted that the counseling provided in the school should start in middle school rather than in high school. Most of the responses were similar. There are so many factors that take a toll on the mental health of adolescents and teenagers from schoolwork, peer pressure, social media influences, hormonal changes, sexual orientations, race, attention deficit syndromes, family expectation, etc. While maintaining all these, it is easy to forget that they are still not adults yet! Teenagers have to deal with a lot, and we tend to ignore it rather than talk about it. This all is even worse in the immigrant population in the USA. One of the intriguing points that came to our attention during our project was the “IMMIGRANT MENTALITY”. So, it goes like this, first-generation parents in the USA want their children to excel in studies, be their best in all the extracurricular activities and embrace the cultural heritage of their parents. All these expectations are bound to happen, but parents must keep one thing in mind; that a child undertaking all these tasks can lead to the mental breakdown of your teenagers.
Please try to give your teenagers space to breathe and learn from their mistakes. Try to remember your days when you were another teenager, I am sure that we all struggled on one or another burden. For example: if you do not talk about some topics like racism, drugs abuse, or sexual orientation at home, teenagers may try to gather information from social media or even from their friends. They might even have good motives, but poor information as they are also just kids! So, try to invest time regularly and talk to your teenagers, and you may start seeing changes, if not, do not hesitate to seek professional help that is very important. Also, to most of the immigrant parents here in the USA or parents in Nepal, please don’t impose your thought process on your teenagers. And I am not cooking up all these, I worked with many teenagers and most of them have similar experiences. I felt like dropping down some experiences of me and my mentees just to advocate about the mental health of teenagers which is still frowned upon. These adolescents are the future and if not tackled properly could lead to mental instability and suicidal thoughts.
Mental health is as important as physical health and I wish we could be louder about the fact. When the adolescent kids are not performing well, try to talk and most importantly listen to them as their friends. They need the assurance of being heard and belonging, that allows them to open. We all live in the world of a rat race and competition and do not always appreciate the mundane things but that is very important. So, try to appreciate any achievements of the children as no achievement is small or big.
I remember while growing up in Nepal, we never used to talk about mental health but as I chose neuroscience as my major, it expanded my horizon and enhanced lots of discussion with my friends and family. I am glad that even on last children’s day, the focus was on the mental health of the children. So in the end my understanding is that proper communication is the key in any kind of relationship and does volumes more than expected. And if you are not able to tackle the situation on your own, talking to the school counselor or clinical psychologist is always best rather than feeling sorry. I grew up listening, “a healthy mind lies in the healthy body”, so it’s high time we should be vocal about, “a healthy mind drives a healthy body”. 😊
(I would like to acknowledge Meera V. and GetMagic for helping us run this research project and Adam J. Dourson, Aaditya R. Adlakha and Dr. Toniya Raut for feedback).
