Adolescence is the time when most mental health problems arise. Diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses increase across the board, with teenagers suffering not only from mood disorders such as depression, but also from the most pervasive psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
The impact of such illnesses is substantial. Suicide is one of the top five most common causes of death in adolescents.
If mental health researchers have long been aware of this sharp rise in psychiatric illnesses, we still struggle to understand and explain why teenagers are so vulnerable to them. One reason for this may be a lack of information on quite how the brain changes in adolescence. To this end, my colleagues and I recently undertook research following a group of teenagers over several years. We were able to assess not only how their brain develops during adolescence, but also how this was related to their evolving mental health.
“At the end of the war men returned from the battlefield grown silent not richer, but poorer in communicable experience”, wrote Walter Benjamin after the first world war. So too, school students may reflect on the pandemic of 2020 and its effect on their experiences.
Almost every day, they heard anxiety-provoking news from across the globe, doled out in rapid fire. Yet many will be poor in the stories of their anticipated rituals and rites of passage to retell in later years.
They have other stories though, of cancellation and loss.
Gather any group of students together and they spontaneously tell different stories of how their formal was cancelled or modified; how their classes were delivered remotely; how they adjusted to the rules of social distancing; or how they missed the opportunity to celebrate their milestone birthday with friends.