Helping young people cope with post-lockdown stress
Posted May 29, 2021, by Doug Wilhelm
Photo by Chloe Hotaling
Almost anyone who knows someone in middle or high school sees signs of the stress that is part of adolescence; I’ve talked with young people who cut, whose hair fell out in patches. But in these pandemic months, our stress has been as self-contained as everything else — and now, young people across the country are “wrestling with feelings of apprehension and uncertainty about what the next year will bring,” the New York Times reported on May 18.
Recent data back this up:
“The proportion of 12- to 17-year-olds visiting emergency rooms for mental health reasons rose 31 percent for most of 2020 compared to 2019,” wrote author Emily Efahani Smith on May 4 in the Times, citing findings from the CDC and from a nationwide survey of 10,000 high school students.
Eighty three percent of those students surveyed, including 92% of females, had experienced “at least one stress-related physical symptom” these recent months, said the recent report Kids Under Pressure, A Look at Student Well-Being and Engagement During the Pandemic, by NBC News and the nonprofit Challenge Success.
Another survey of 16- to 24-year-olds, by the America’s Promise Alliance, found that 70% have been dealing with heightened stress at least half the time, while 34.5% have felt that way “most of the time” or “always.”
For insights on how to recognize signs of high stress in young people — and how to help them cope, to find the resilience that may have also grown through this hard time — I talked with Cindy Carraway-Wilson, director of training for Youth Catalytics, and with Matthew MacNeil, an outpatient clinician and director of evaluation at Howard Center, a Burlington, Vt. nonprofit that provides mental-health services to young people and adults.
“In my clinical work, I’ve seen that apprehension,” Matt said. “When kids have been remote and have been in their own homes, for month after month without the practice of engagement in face-to-face contact with their peers — that's a muscle they weren't flexing. So that creates anxiety about, ‘Wait, I'm going to be back in this mix; how am I going to do this in a way that makes me feel connected to my friends and makes me seem like I'm okay?’”
Now that schools are reopening, a first sign of heightened stress can be that a young person “is not showing interest in some of the things they used to find pleasurable, and if there’s any type of avoidance,” Matt advised. “That would be my first warning sign.”
“People know ‘angry,’ ‘sad,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘happy,’ but there are all kinds of other nuances. So get out your emotional dictionary, and begin by labeling your own emotions.”
“Look for changes in typical behavior,” Cindy Carraway-Wilson agreed. “Look for increased or decreased sleeping or eating, and for shifts in emotions.” If you spot any of those indicators, she said, “the best thing you can do is have conversations.
“Talk to them about how they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing. Talk to them about how these unusual circumstances have affected them — and share how they’ve affected you. You don’t need to put your adult stresses on them, but you can say, ‘I’ve been having trouble this past year and a half, not being able to do the things I love to do with friends. It has made me feel kind of blue. Are you experiencing that?”
“There have been so many small losses”
In talking with young people, Cindy said, you can help them label their emotions — and not just in the most familiar terms. “People know ‘angry,’ ‘sad,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘happy,’ but there are all kinds of other nuances.” For example: confused, anxious, fearful ...
“So get out your emotional dictionary,” she said, “and begin by labeling your own emotions. Set the example and model it. Once you start that process, you can begin to have those conversations.
“You can also do some mindfulness exercises — for example, the silver linings practice, sometimes called Three Good Things,” she said. “You sit down and talk to young people about how it’s been a super hard year; let’s take a moment and identify three good things that happened as a result. Write that down, journal about it. Share it with somebody.”
I asked Matt if he thought this time will have changed young people in long-lasting or permanent ways. “I hope not,” he said. “But the reality is, there have been so many small losses that everyone has experienced in the past 18 months, youth in particular.
“If you think about all those small milestones, like eighth grade graduation, the end of the year field trip — those are little losses that people I think don't acknowledge for every youth, or that seem frivolous. But those milestones are crucial in youth development, and we essentially have lost a year's worth of them, which I do worry will have long-term impacts.”
We can often reassure in simple ways. “One of the things I've really tried to reinforce clinically,” Matt said, “is, ‘Hey, you know, there's a core of your peers who are just going to be thrilled to see you. They’re going to be thrilled to have more normal interactions, without masks.’”
The other side of screen time
We worry about the negative impacts on young people of all their recent immersion in the screens of their devices. But Matt and Cindy also see a positive side to that.
“Many young people are engaging in online activism — political, environmental, Black Lives Matter — and they can share this with their friends,” Cindy said. “It’s another way of engaging.”
Even in online gaming, “kids have been finding interesting ways to engage,” she said, “and a lot of that is healthy. Many young people, in the process of playing video games, recognize that another person is showing signs that maybe they're in trouble, and reach out and say, ‘Hey, do you need help?’ This is happening enough that professionals are beginning to look at how we can engage with youth in gaming, like with avatars.”
“The converse side of the screen time is that it's forced providers to be a bit more innovative,” Matt added. At Howard Center, “we had some ridiculously little percentage of tele-health offered before the pandemic. Now we're booming with tele-health, and online interactive therapy, and that's also forced innovation. This might make accessing health care more amenable or usable in the future.”
Finally, Cindy said, it’s important to find ways to counter all the worrying and negative information we’ve all absorbed over the past year.
“One fix is to talk to young people about how they themselves can give something to the people who are important to them, even something as simple as a gratitude message. I'm talking about parents, teachers, faith groups, peer groups. The giving and receiving of gratitude has positive impacts on both sides.
“We’ve been looking for months at Covid deaths, mass shootings, police shootings, it's all been so negative — and that has reinforced our brains' natural tendency to see things that way,” she summed up. “But we can shift the conversation. We can teach our brain to see the positive.”