From: The Wall Street Journal
How Young People Learn to Be Unhappy
Why do so many young people have mental-health problems? The growing focus on students’ anxiety and depression, while well-intentioned, may be making psychological distress seem inevitable. Instead of fostering a supportive community for adolescent and young-adult students with mental-health concerns, we may be reinforcing a false and destructive belief that misery is universal among young people.
Students regularly post self-deprecating social-media comments about how stressed they are, detailing their deteriorating mental health and inability to stop doomscrolling. These declarations are more than venting or seeking social support. For some, they’ve become signals of virtue.
Students who want to improve the world—and we believe most do—seem to believe that happiness implies insensitivity to others’ pain. It’s a twist on the adage, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Today it’s more like, “If you’re not miserable, you don’t care.” When joy does surface, it’s often tempered with guilt, as if contentment signals naiveté or indifference.
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Comments
Great observation! Emphasizing the mental health difficulties of young people is necessary to draw resources and focus research on them, but also has the danger of affecting the perception they have about themselves and causing them to overlook the positive resources they have. This risks instilling a pessimistic mindset.
On our side, I think the comments on the negative implications of becoming or staying happy are congruent with our research on implicit dilemmas. We have developed EYME (Explore Your Meanings), based on the repertory grid technique, to detect these dilemmas.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jclp.23771
In the case example presented in this article, an implicit dilemma was detected using the EYME (Explore Your Meanings) platform: becoming “smarter” (a personal construct of hers) meant becoming more “selfish.” Thus, Mary found herself trapped between two negative outcomes—she could remain a “good person” but “naïve”, or she could become more “smart” at the cost of becoming “selfish” (a change in her core values). This finding provides the therapist with a target for intervention. Just discovering this identity conflict when exploring her “mental map” immersively with VR had a strong impact on her.
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