Big Little Epidemics
By Alex Reszelska
In modern times, children have access to everything. And that includes mental illness.
These are perilous times to be a parent. Two years ago, the world’s environmental and economic crisis merged with the biggest health tornado in a decade. The result was unprecedented. COVID-19 has spread worldwide, taking many lives, unleashing the weakness of health systems and leaving half of the globe in a state of distress. Tragically, the pandemic revealed the fragility of our status quo.
As parents, we do everything to ensure our children are safe and thriving. To all of our economic abilities, we strive to give them a good education, nutritious food, brain-boosting toys and weather-appropriate clothing. To protect them from physical harm, we childproof our homes, install quality car seats and carefully cut our kids’ grapes in half. Later in life, we teach them to swim, read and make friends. We help them with homework, trying to instil in them the belief that they’re always enough to succeed in this world. How, though, do we prepare a child for life in an uncertain world? And is there a way to inoculate them against the future of overwhelm?
They’re not okay
An increasing number of data shows that modern kids are not alright, and they have not been okay for a while. In the US, the rates of adolescent depression have been on the rise since the mid-2000s. One of the recent analyses by Pew Research Centre shows that from 2007 to 2017, the percentage of 12-17-year-old Americans who had experienced a major depressive episode jumped from 8 to 13 per cent. The New York Times has recently published a shortlist of anxiety-themed books for little ones. It claimed: “Anxiety is on the rise in all age groups, and even toddlers are not immune.”
In Australia, a 2015 governmental study found that one in seven 4-17-year-olds (13.9 per cent) had experienced a mental disorder, which is the equivalent of 560,000 Australian children. Two years later, Mission Australia published a new survey of 24,055 teenagers (aged 15-19). In it, nearly 34 per cent of young people admitted that mental health is the most critical issue in Australia, up from only 14.9 per cent in 2015.
In this already-malfunctioning mental health landscape, suddenly, the global pandemic arrived, bringing with it volatility, stress and despair. At the end of the second lockdown in Victoria, Kids Helpline revealed that the attempted suicide rates among Victorian teenagers aged 13 to 18 skyrocketed by 184 per cent while emergency calls from 5 to 9-year-olds had increased by more than 80 per cent. Additionally, the phone counselling service admitted that their counsellors were calling police and ambulances 53 times a week to help suicidal or abused children as young as five.
Dr Zena Burgess, a psychologist and CEO of the Australian Psychological Society (APS), says that even though mental health issues amongst the youngest Australians have been on the rise for many years, the scale of the problem is truly shocking.
“Children are bearing the brunt of mental health concerns triggered or exacerbated by the pandemic. Their parents are stressed and anxious, and kids pick up on that. If you add to it the pressures of social media, homeschooling and isolation, you get a pretty dire picture,” Dr Burgess explains.
In a state of hypnosis
When you’re small, your world is confined to those closest to you. And it is childhood, as neuroscientists recently discovered, that lays the strongest foundations for a solid mental immunity. Not solely, but in a large proportion, who we are today is a by-product of the first social influences and interactions we experience – from our imminent family, relatives, friends, school environment and even the cultural narratives of the country we are born in.
For all the brain’s mysteries, the answer to the mental health dilemma seems to lie directly inside our heads. But not necessarily in its physical structure. Even though we still know very little about genetics and epigenetics, there’s a growing body of research on the unconscious mind and the hidden biology underlying mental disorders.
An adult brain’s electrical activity, as measured by the electroencephalography (EEG), shows that on a daily basis, we move between five states, from the lowest-frequency delta waves (when we sleep) to the highest-frequency gamma waves (i.e. our brain ‘on fire’). Surprisingly, children’s brains operate mainly on two lowest frequencies, theta and delta. American neurobiologist and spiritual teacher Joe Dispenza calls it ‘functioning from the subconscious’ because a baby’s thinking brain – the neocortex – is operating at very low levels. From age 2 to 5 or 6, a child starts to demonstrate slightly higher EEG patterns, moving into theta and alpha waves. “All information from the outside world enters the brain with little editing, critical thinking or judgment,” he says.
In other words, until they reach six years of age, a child is almost literally ‘out of this world’, walking around as if in a permanent state of hypnosis. It means that the youngest people’s minds are very vulnerable, soaking everything up like a sponge and shaping the internal worldview in the process. These are the years when they take on beliefs about themselves and life, which – although often unconscious – will manifest in their future behaviours, goals and achievements, in how they will choose their friends, life partners and work commitments.
A creative, plastic brain is a beautiful thing. But when children are at their most fragile, between age 0 and 6, what we say around them enters their subconscious mind, and they accept it at face value. And while having your child believe in Santa Claus won’t do them any harm, throwing phrases like ‘Big boys don’t cry’ or ‘You’re just silly’ can have a lasting, negative impact. “The evolution has endowed babies and young children with the ability to download an unimaginable number of behaviours and beliefs very quickly, all for the sake of learning. Let’s use it to their advantage, not pitfall,” biologist Bruce Lipton sums it up poignantly.
Anxiety travels
One pillar of mental health research has been a better understanding of the genetics of mental illness. So far, there have been many studies looking at particular gene variants that are risk factors for some severe disorders – schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Other mental illnesses, such as PTSD and generalised anxiety disorder, remain less understood, but there’s still an agreement – their disposition is partly hereditary. For example, studies of twins suggest that about 30 to 40 per cent of a child’s risk for an anxiety disorder is genetic (the odds for bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia are 60 per cent). Additionally, mental health travels in families because it is highly contagious. Family members influence each other on many levels – half of the children who live with an anxious parent have a chance of developing an anxiety disorder themselves.
The dangers of creating a society where every child is born right into the arms of anxiety or depression are huge because worldwide, the parents are struggling. Lynn Lyons, a therapist and co-author of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents, writes that the childhood mental-health crisis has become a self-perpetuating vicious circle. The more anxious the kids, the more fearful their parents. And the more fearful parents become, the more they continue to do the things contributing to these problems.
“We need a more open conversation about how stressed parents are about their children’s success in the world and what other people will think of them. They need to be able to admit that they have been anxious or depressed for several years, too. That a pattern of stress or anxiety or depression or trauma has been lingering in their family culture for generations,” Lyons adds.
The village we burnt
At the end of his life, in the late 1990s, American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck lamented that people lost the glue that has kept them happy and flourishing. “There can be no vulnerability without risk; no community without vulnerability. There can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community,” he fretted. Because when poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island, he meant that humans need to connect with other humans to thrive. Another psychologist Noam Shpancer sums it up well when he says that: “Human beings are distinctly, spectacularly social. Lonely and isolated, we cannot survive”.
Part of the problem with mental health in modern families – for parents and their children alike – is the isolation we live in, which has been evident even before the pandemic. Dr Zena Burgess reminds us that decades ago, people lived in villages or within broad family communities where they had extensive support, which allowed them to share their problems and get access to imminent healing and support.
“Nowadays, people tend to be much more isolated. Young people start parenting, doing the best they can, but they have no training, in some cases little community support, and no one to show them how it can be done. So they make mistakes, which is fine, as none of us is perfect. But all the challenges of parenting kids, starting from infancy to late teens, pile up, and it becomes difficult for parents to cope with the pressures,” Dr Burgess explains.
Face the worrisome
It may sound harsh, but the problem with kids today is a crisis of modern parenting, and that’s not an easy puzzle to solve. To become less stressed, parents need access to therapies and other forms of support, from friendly chats, running, yoga to meditation, which require time, money and motivation. Only a rested and well-balanced human can attend to another human’s needs while staying present, loving and gracious. And what about work? The piles of laundry? Never-ending chores, lists and applications to fill? What about additional challenges like health emergencies and caring for an elderly family member?
While the pandemic has allowed people to work from home, supposedly more unrushed and balanced, many parents have found that they now spend extended hours working and live with blurred boundaries between work and home. Such situations leave them with little energy for children – for play and other enriching experiences.
Dr Burgess suggests that as a country, we need early intervention services for families to assist them with child-related challenges. “We also need to destigmatise the notion of how hard parenting can be, especially when for many, it’s a lifetime role, performed whilst trying to earn a living and manage home life,” the psychologist explains.
Attending to parental health first seems to pay off. In one research, Professor Myrna Weissman from Columbia University found out that treating a depressed mother with antidepressants quickly reduced depressive symptoms in her child. Other studies confirmed that having parents access psychotherapy (such as CBT) has the same indirect benefit for the kids.
One of the most recent frontiers of the global fight with anxiety has been to shift the parental lens from saving the kids to empowering them. For example, a new psychological program at Yale University focuses on adults: teaching them to move away from hovering and accommodating their children to allow the youngest to confront anxiety. Kate Julian writes about these tools in The Atlantic, saying that “if we want to prepare our kids for difficult times, we should let them fail at things now, and allow them to encounter obstacles and to talk candidly about worrisome topics.”
There’s also another important question we can all ask ourselves – whether we are parents already, or are just planning to start a family. What is the culture of our family? Is it fearful? Competitive? Stressed? Punitive? Distracted? Then, we can begin to redefine the values that influence our mental health. Instead of pushing our kids to achieve big things in school or sports, maybe we can listen to what they love to do. And instead of suffering through the job that we will never enjoy – just for the social status or because we’re scared of change – maybe we can try to figure out the way to do what we love, too, modelling to our kids how happiness and resilience are interconnected.
Because just as you can’t pour from an empty cup, you can’t treat children’s mental health issues without healing their parents.
If you’re feeling stressed, mentally exhausted or depressed, don’t hesitate to contact your GP to talk about accessing further help.
