Taking a Different Path on Teenage Wellbeing

Happened to catch the last part of an interview with Dr Darby Saxbe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darby_Saxbe) on the radio the other week. She is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at USC. Most of the interview was focussed on her work on parenting and the way both male and female brains change in response to becoming parents. But at the end, the host, Jesse Mulligan, asked her to speak about a NYTimes article she had written, and which Jesse obviously considered more than a little controversial.

It was simple enough. Dr Darby suggested that while we want young people to have access to mental health resources, an over exposure to mental health content, especially via social media, may 'exacerbate the odds that we are going to pathologise or consider to be problematic our ordinary bad moods' and 'inflate the likelihood you're going to start to see something deeply wrong with your own mental health'. She also pointed out that 'not all content is scientifically well vetted or validated'.

What is the alternative? Dr Saxbe suggested a more resilience-based focus for teen mental health using questions such as "How can I survive in the face of challenges?" and "How can I adapt and thrive when things are hard?" as opposed to statements like "I'm struggling and therefore there is something wrong with me, I need a diagnosis and a formal treatment plan".

I share her concern that the effect of social media, and the endless 'therapeutic influencers', is that the problem gets even worse. The person who searches for "why am I always feeling sad", will inadvertently trigger social media algorithms which then ensure that they are fed ads and content dealing with depression, including 'solutions' from unqualified sources.

I have long been convinced, both in our work with teenagers (hoozyu.com / kokkoi.com/for-youth ) and in our work with large organisations (elaura.com / kokkoi.com ) that developing:

• resilience (based upon understanding yourself and being intentional about managing your life to engage your own interests and meet your own needs - while also understanding that other people are likely to have different interests and needs) and
• self-efficacy (using objective, accurate and positive data about yourself to arrive at the conviction that you can do a great many things, that conviction itself leading to a dramatic increase in the likelihood of your achieving that success)

are far more important in equipping people of any age to deal with change, stress and uncertainty, than most of the proffered alternatives.

So why might Jesse have considered Dr Saxbe's a controversial view. I guess one question I can see is 'Is this simply a return to the "suck-it-up, it's-good-for-you" regime I grew up with during the 60s and 70s, and which certainly characterised the experience of the post-war generations?'

Not at all. I don't think that was what she was saying.

That was often brutal and unstructured, quite literally sink or swim, and sometimes into very deep and dangerous waters. This is talking about investing time and effort in coaching young people to understand themselves and develop workable strategies for coping with life and its challenges. It also takes into account that every young person is different.

But if the outcome is young people who can navigate their own challenges, while being there for those around them, that seems like a much more healthy result than what we are seeing at present. As someone on the frontline observed to me the other day, "all our resource goes into managing young people who pose a physical danger to themselves or others; and the rest need to fend for themselves."

My last observation would be that if we, as parents, grand-parents and caregivers, can lead the way on giving our young people this gift of resilience and self-efficacy, we will grow teenagers who in turn can grow resilient, productive kids of their own when they become parents. And then schools and youth services can go back to their proper role of reinforcing what is taught in the home - instead of trying desperately to patch together a fractured society with inadequate resource.