What You Need to Know About Teen Mental Health
A summary, a ton of resources and proactive steps from Dr. Beth Cooper Benjamin
This week, as I continue to gradually expand the scope of this newsletter, I am thrilled to welcome guest author Dr. Beth Cooper Benjamin to Talking Out of School. One of the biggest challenges facing schools is supporting kids who are struggling with mental health issues - and although this post focuses on the latest findings and proactive approaches for teens, I’ve heard this from lower school folks as well. We already live in an overwhelming world and the pandemic intensified it all.
The article below is helpful on many levels, providing an easily referenced summary, an embarrassment of riches in resources - links for a deeper dive and additional material - and practical advice on how to move forward.
Beth specializes in counteracting the effects of “achievement culture” where kids feel the pressure to meet incredibly high expectations, all the time. She led the resiliency project at Westover School where she worked directly with faculty on how to elevate pedagogy and classroom management practices they already used to help draw attention to and mitigate the impact of achievement culture. I think this approach has the potential to transform the day to day life of the students.
I encourage any of you who are interested in Beth’s work to contact her at the link in her bio! She is also a dream collaborator and was incredibly patient with me as I ran around with my hair on fire during the pandemic (well, maybe it wasn’t on fire, but it was usually smoldering and it would not be unusual for me to email her to tell her I’d be late for our zoom.) Beth and I also did a super fun interview that supplements this article and will be posted in August. We even dared to take on Barbie and ask the question: is Barbie just achievement culture in a pink dress? - even though neither of us had yet seen it (isn’t that part of the fun of a “take”?).
The heat may be getting to me… :). Onward!
Dr. Beth Cooper Benjamin is an adolescent development scholar, an achievement culture critic, and a designer and facilitator of civic engagement and leadership programming for young people. She has developed civic engagement strategy as Founding Associate Director of the Center for Social Responsibility at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center, and served as Director of the Westover Resiliency Project at Westover, a girls' boarding and day high school in Middlebury, CT. There she led a grant-funded initiative to challenge achievement pressure and perfectionism and to foster resilience and well-being among students and adult staff. Benjamin has authored both scholarly and popular articles, and she consults on research, strategy, programs, and training with individual and organizational clients through her website bethcooperbenjamin.com. She received her masters and doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Benjamin lives with her husband and their two young sons in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she practices embracing imperfection as a cook and a knitter (and as a parent, too!).
Here’s Beth!
Teen Mental Health - A Cribsheet for School Leaders
If your news diet is similar to mine, then you’ve probably been inundated lately with stories about the mental health of both young people and adults. Schools are, of course, no strangers to these concerns, especially over the past few years as stressors from the pandemic to political polarization have pushed all of us closer to (or well past) the limits of our resilience. Having worked with teens and educators for many years, I have read these reports with keen interest–and perhaps a bit of skepticism. Since I know school leaders are deeply concerned but also spinning a lot of plates, I’m offering this overview of current research, along with some implications for independent school leaders. I’ll also recommend some of my favorite resources if you want to dig deeper on your own.
In this piece, I’m going to address four topics:
A sharp decline in teens’ mental health;
The role of achievement culture in driving toxic stress for teens;
The risks of teen smartphone and social media use;
A crisis of loneliness and isolation for adults.
Now let’s look at each of these topics in more detail.
The “Teen Mental Health Crisis”
A ten-year review of data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) garnered a lot of headlines this past spring, and for good reason. The CDC’s data showed a pronounced rise over the decade from 2011-2021 in teens reporting feelings of hopelessness and suicidal ideation, of adolescents visiting emergency rooms for acute mental distress (and facing a dearth of skilled clinicians and dedicated treatment facilities), a spike in teens reporting feelings of loneliness and isolation, and one absolutely heart-rending data point that 24% of teen girls surveyed in 2021 had made a suicide plan. In fact, girls turned out to be faring markedly worse than male peers across nearly all mental health variables (queer-identified youth were also at a significantly-increased risk for poor mental health and suicide). Thankfully there is reason to think that 2021–still in the thick of disrupted schooling and social distancing restrictions–may have been a peak for teens’ symptoms; initial data from 2022 have indicated some improvement.
Yet an earlier report of Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey results showed that teen mental health was already declining steeply before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. More than one-in-three high school students in the decade leading up to the pandemic reported experiencing persistent sadness or hopelessness during the previous year–enough that they declined to participate in regular activities (nearly half of girls reported this). Alarmingly, this finding represented a 40% increase from 2009-2019: from 26% to 37% of high school students.
Suicidal ideation and suicide risk have markedly increased according to these same data sets. Reliance on hospital emergency rooms for treatment of acute mental and behavioral crises has grown as well, particularly as the pandemic exacerbated teens’ vulnerabilities and stresses. And this increased demand for services has run up against a shortage of skilled providers, especially with specialization in adolescence, resulting in additional bottlenecks in the mental health care system.
Increased Attention to Achievement Culture
I’ve been talking about achievement culture in my own professional work for several years. In fact I met our wonderful host, Julie Faulstich, when she hired me to pilot a project to examine and address these issues at Westover School. Lately, though, it seems I’ve had a lot more company in this conversation! So what’s going on?
In the last decade, the resilience scholar Suniya Luthar and colleagues began to identify students attending “high-achieving schools” as being at increased risk for chronic stress. (This category includes both public and private schools that have the resources to offer lots of enrichment, extracurriculars, and advanced coursework, and where most students go on to four-year colleges.) A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report in 2018 used the term “excessive pressure to excel” to describe what students in these educational institutions were experiencing. And that was before the pandemic. As the public conversation about teen mental health has grown over the past several months, consideration of achievement pressure has emerged as a distinct strand of the discourse. The psychologist Lisa Damour has described the situation as “too much input, too much output.” Teens are processing so much information today, from news of the world to what all their friends are doing right now (more on that below). At the same time we’re also expecting much more from them; just compare what today’s high school students do to gain admission to selective colleges versus the college application process a generation ago. And we know this doesn’t end at graduation: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently reported that young people are questioning “hustle culture” for driving them towards external achievements but not realizing its promise of happiness and fulfillment.
Risks of Digital Technology and Social Media
Every generation in this country seems to have its own moral panic over emerging technology and its effects on youth. I grew up surrounded by fears about TV rotting kids’ brains and video games turning us into sociopaths. As a parent of young kids, I fret about their access to developmentally-inappropriate material online and now the emerging challenges of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, today many experts are tying teens’ anxiety and depression to their use of digital technology (e.g., smartphones) and social media. The psychologist Jean Twenge studies large national data sets on teens’ attitudes and behaviors; she argues that the sharp decline in teens’ wellbeing has roughly coincided with the wide-scale adoption of smartphones and social media among young people. Surgeon General Murthy also recently warned about the dangers of social media for young people, from its addictive quality to its negative impact on body image (especially for girls) to the extent to which it has replaced in-person social interaction. Both Murthy and Twenge–along with vocal critics like Jonathan Haidt–have called for policy changes including tightening children’s access to accounts, raising the minimum age to register an account, and requiring platforms to share their algorithms so that parents and policymakers can understand how the content shown to young people is selected.
Not everyone is ready to condemn teens’ smartphone and social media use outright, however. Lisa Damour, for one, takes a more nuanced stance, arguing that in moderation, technology can help young teens stay connected to each other (and that barring it can leave them isolated), and that it can be a lifeline for marginalized teens who may find acceptance and community online that is unavailable to them in person. She does worry, however, when technology interferes with teens’ biologically-determined need for increased sleep (and states emphatically that cell phones and other electronics should not be in teens’ bedrooms overnight).
It’s Not Just The Kids
The challenges I’ve discussed here have all been focused on young people. And the data do point to big spikes in distress during the teen years; in fact, as Derek Thompson reports in his Atlantic newsletter, economic data show that more advanced economies tend to produce happier adults…but unhappier teens. Yet we all know that these challenging cultural and environmental forces–hustle culture, technology, the pandemic, etc.–aren’t only affecting young people. In fact, in his efforts to make mental health a public health priority, the Surgeon General has recently issued an Advisory about both the mental and physical health costs of increasing loneliness and isolation among adults from all social and economic backgrounds. (For example, one study cited in the Advisory found that a lack of social connection raises an individual’s risk of premature death by the same margin as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.) And recent research and reporting have articulated the value of maintaining a diversity of connections from close intimate relationships, to friendships at work, to the ordinary pleasure and outsized impact of “weak ties.”
Implications for Independent School Leaders
So what’s a school leader to do? Here are some recommendations and considerations that speak to the independent school context:
There’s clearly reason for concern and action on teen mental health, but it’s not useful to pathologize distress itself. Experiencing distress–particularly in response to upsetting events in the social environment or wider world–is normal, human, and developmentally necessary for teens. And some sources of teens’ distress–like fears about gun violence or the climate crisis–are legitimate existential threats, to which feeling upset or anxious seems like a reasonable reaction. (Both Lisa Damour and Making Caring Common’s Rick Weissbourd discussed this perspective in a recent Askwith Education Forum on teen mental health.) Our job as caring adults is to help young people build their capacity to recognize, experience, and manage their emotions. Characterizing distress per se as unwarranted or dangerous does not serve this goal.
The increase in demand for adolescent mental health services is far outpacing the availability of providers (especially for providers of color). Unfortunately, no quick fix is going to pump out expert clinicians, but schools have a crucial role to play in that provider pipeline. Independent schools can help in both the short- and longer-term by making sure they offer robust training and supervision experiences for early-career clinicians and have culturally-responsive supports for clinicians of color.
Research has shown that having just one trusting relationship with an adult in school or the community can protect students from mental health problems and improve academic outcomes. Independent schools have an opportunity to lead the charge for change by prioritizing wellness, school culture, and community-building. (Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project built its Relationship Mapping Initiative on this work and has some resources available online.)
Pushing back against achievement culture poses real dilemmas for independent schools, including: parental resistance and worry (particularly about college admissions); alumni and trustee investment in a school’s perceived prestige and rigor; concerns about declining standards or the need to compensate for pandemic learning loss; and even resistance from students themselves, especially if they are intent on a narrow set of name-brand colleges. However, we know that not being proactive has huge costs too, and there’s so much schools can do to help! One place to start: consider whether your school culture embraces–and even celebrates–mistakes. From critique in art to experimentation in science, every discipline leverages flaws and failures to produce stronger work. Learning to engage in this iterative process is a muscle schools can help students develop–one that can also pay dividends in terms of deep engagement. Consultancies like Challenge Success work with school communities to address these issues. (Actually, so do I!)
Employees need the community independent schools offer, too. At Westover, the Resiliency Project’s faculty/staff cohort experience took on new significance as the school emerged from the crush of Covid-19. Weekly cohort discussions offered adults (both old and–given the high rate of pandemic turnover–many new) a space to re/build connections with colleagues and to talk about pedagogy and praxis, topics of deep interest that had been pushed to the margins in the the constant triage of Covid schooling. As schools work to rebuild community, let’s remember that fostering connectedness is key to faculty and staff members’ wellness just as it is for students.
Go Deeper
Here are a few additional resources on these topics that I’ve found really valuable of late:
The Ezra Klein Show presented a pair of podcast interviews about teen mental health recently: one with Jean Twenge and one with Lisa Damour. Both are excellent and they’re even better as companion pieces.
Want a Healthy College Kid? Start Now. – Sam Shapiro, Head of Marin Montessori School and Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life at University of Southern California, look at mental health on college campuses and discuss why helping kids develop their own definitions of success from an early age is a crucial task for parents and educators.
After Student’s Suicide, An Elite School Says It Fell “Tragically Short” – This article examines the cautionary tale of and unusually forthcoming statement from The Lawrenceville School following a student’s suicide, which an investigation attributed at least in part to his experience of bullying at school. Lawrenceville’s public admission of accountability and commitment to comprehensive reform could serve as a model for independent schools seeking to invest seriously in student wellbeing.
Jonathan Haidt just ran an excellent piece on his After Babel Substack arguing The Case for Phone-Free Schools. He offers guidance for how schools can pull this off, including anticipating some common sources of resistance. This is a great resource for schools reviewing their policies around students’ cell phones, phone-enabled watches, and the like.
Thank you, Beth!
And I was preparing this post, Jonathan Haidt published this interesting piece on his Substack.
