Tag: mental health

My Opinion on Emerging Adulthood

In 2000, Jeffrey Arnet introduced a new term to our society: emerging adulthood. It is used to describe the transition period that one goes through as they go from being adolescent to an independent fully-functioning adult. The age range is about 18 to 25. For my parents’ generation, this term wouldn’t be applicable because they didn’t go through this weird transition phase. Neither of my parents went to college; my dad graduated from high school and went straight to work while my mom graduated from vocational school and became a nurse. Since middle school, they had been living away from home and taking care of themselves. At the age of 15, they were required to be independent, prepping for them for the responsibilities of being an adult.

For my generation, I’m not quite sure when we become fully independent from our parents. I have seen people my age been taken care of all the way up to college if not after. With this unrealistic idea that anyone and everyone can attend college, everyone has their eye on the prize: a college education. Parents obsess over their kids going into college, especially Asian ones, and that pressure isn’t necessarily healthy for their kids. And even while in college, parents are monitoring their children left and right, helping them fill out FAFSA, paying for their tuition, dictating their majors. Some of these kids could have just been fine going to a vocational school doing what they like, but instead they’re thrust into a vacuum of unknown.

I’m not surprised I ended up with mental health issues and still struggle. While I was baited into going to Boston University and having my parents take out loans for my education, my brother went to De Anza and paid for his education. Sure I learned a lot and grew a lot, but for a while, I was also just confused with what the hell I was supposed to do in life. Sometimes I wish society hadn’t put unrealistic ideas into my head, that your dreams are achievable.

And for those who were lucky enough to have everything paid for by their parents, from college tuition to rent to food, they didn’t need to worry about money. Sure they may have some trouble deciding on a career, but they got a cushion if they fail. My cushion is a lot thinner than theirs. I blame the birth of the term, emerging adulthood, on the pressures of this “need” for everyone to be in higher education, regardless of your wealth status and capabilities. This “need” has thrown young adults like me into a warp hole called emerging adulthood where we technically an adult but unequipped to be an actual adult.

Five Features of Emerging Adulthood

Emerging adulthood covers the transition from dependency to responsibility as people my age prepare for a career, choose a profession, and learn how to live independently.  Let us examine the 5 primary features:

Identity Exploration

After graduating high school, you finish one chapter of your life and move forward with the next, whether that be a four year college or straight into work with community college on the side. So begins the start of your journey to figure out the meaning of your life in this world. You are no longer the person you are in high school, and now you come face to face with this question: “Who am I? And what is my purpose?” Going off to college opens up the door to more decisions than you had in high school and some of those decisions could be really risky, either dangerous or rewarding. You begin to question you parents’ values and even your own, when you meet people from different backgrounds and different stories. I guarantee that you will enter college one person and leave college a different person (variability depends on the person).

Instability

During the ages of 18 through 25, you are simultaneously exploring your identity and trying to figure out what to do with your life. Some of you are lucky and have already found something that you do want to do for the rest of your life. For most people, it’s unclear, and we can see the instability in my generation when the average time spent working for one company is 2-3 years. If you stayed longer, people would probably think you’re strange. But, even before you start your profession post college, your instability started in moving away to college. I moved from California to Massachusetts. Both states were pretty liberal so I didn’t experience too much of a cultural shock, but I hadn’t realized how big of an effect moving away from “safe people” like my parents and friends were. I started experiencing separation anxiety when I decided to spend a semester abroad in France. That forced me to be in a new environment, which can be very emotionally taxing, and it made me miss a semester with my friends back at BU. Missing out that semester with some of my friends actually made me really depressed because I felt like the puzzle piece that didn’t fit in. As if I was part of a different puzzle. This all happened in less than four years, and the instability left me little time to emotionally adjust and adapt.

Feeling In-Between

Most people who are in this phase of emerging adulthood feel that they are neither a teenager nor an actual adult because they are still dependent on their parents for certain things, but are also in the process of learning how to be independent.

Self-Focused

I was so self-focused since I graduated high school, because it was constantly about who I was to become in college. I was constantly worried about how I felt and how a situation made me feel. I was so concerned with my own well-being, with how I felt like I let my parents down. It didn’t help that there are so many books now out on the market about self-love and self-improvement. Sometimes being self-focused can be helpful because you can learn new things about yourself, but sometimes it’s not so helpful when focusing on yourself means failing to see what is happening around you.

Endless Possibility

Supposedly, there are endless possibilities for the young emerging adult. We have been made to feel that we are invincible and can accomplish anything that we set our minds to.

I personally think that this is wrong, and can be a significant factor in young people’s development of mental health disorders.

A Millennial’s View on Depression

My first bout of depression happened in middle school when my boyfriend of eight months dumped me two days before Valentine’s Day. I was sad, but I didn’t think much of it, shoving broken pieces of a pound of milk chocolate into my mouth. Fast forward to senior year of high school, my mom let me skip school that day because I didn’t feel well emotionally. I wasn’t sad, but I wasn’t happy either, just a feeling of not wanting to do anything. Jump to college, depression and anxiety decided to formally invite themselves into my life. I had always thought that depression meant I have to have suicidal thoughts, and I never had those thoughts. I didn’t think I could be going through depression until my fiancé (then boyfriend) asked if I was depressed. I remember going online and searching up the symptoms.

Apathy. Check. Difficulty concentrating. Check. Loss of interest in food. Check (this was the biggest red flag for me because even when I was sad before, I would still enjoy eating). Withdrawal from friends. Check.

Even as I distanced myself from things that I thought were causing me stress, I was still feeling very anxious, apathetic, and depressed. However, my own peers started opening up about mental health issues. And, I thought, why is my generation, the millennial generation, so susceptible to depression and other mental health issues?

I pondered this while scrolling aimlessly through Instagram and Snapchat, all the while wishing that my life could be better than where I currently was. It didn’t click then, but I would realize later on the connection between social media and mental health in millennials.

Millennials and Mental Health

Perfectionism

Growing up as a part of the millennial generation, I was constantly inspired by personal improvement in both the economic and social spheres. It was all about self-improvement and with mental health issues on the rise, now it’s self-care. There was a huge output of self-improvement books, workshops, guest speakers. People told me that I could achieve anything as long as I put my heart and mind to it: a college degree that leads to a good career that leads to better social standing and stability for my me and my parents as well. I didn’t know it, but that was a really heavy burden for a 15-year-old still trying to figure out who she was in this world while translating for her parents and trailblazing for her younger siblings. Millennials like me in the States are less concerned with working for a living, we are concerned with achieving perfection, leading us to set excessively high personal standards and being overly critical in our self-evaluations. Millennials experience all three types of perfectionism as described in the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale: self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed.

For me, my self-oriented perfectionism pushed me to hold two to three jobs at a time on top of taking a full semester, socializing, and managing club activities. I aspired to be a superwoman like all my peers who seemed so successful. My other-oriented perfectionism showed up in my annoyance and disappointment with those who couldn’t accomplish their club officer duties, straining my relationships. Lastly, my socially prescribed perfectionism manifested from people’s view of me as a superwoman: I was always on top of my things, I had a great romantic relationship, and I always approached issues very calmly. Behind closed doors, the stress eventually piled up and broke me. My room was a mess, my relationship was a mess, and I was very far from being calm.  A vicious cycle started because I would see myself like this and hate myself for not being good enough, and depression would drag me down, even more, rendering me emotionless.

Social Media

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At first, social media was simply a way to pass time and entertain myself with. But slowly, the contents I viewed began to shape my values or ideas of what being successful means. Instead of being able to see my own talents and accomplishments, I became envious of other people’s success as portrayed in their personal media. Other people seemed to have a better life than I had. I started critiquing myself and even had meltdowns when I felt like I couldn’t achieve anything. I didn’t feel like anything I did was enough. I felt like I was letting my parents down.

Statistics claim that 88% of 18 to 29-year-olds use some kind of social media network. I am positive that I am not the only one affected by social media, nor am I the only one carrying this burden of striving for perfection. As a generation, we millennials are taught to succeed in a certain way. But, not everyone fits into this idealistic image of success ranging from traveling for a living, starting their own company right out of college, having a career of their dreams. Our smartphones help us organize our lives, but they are also strongly correlated to anxiety and depression in millennials today.

How You Can Help

Notice the Symptoms

  • Apathy: They are expressing a lack of interest and emotions.
  • Difficulty Concentrating: They have a hard time paying attention in class or focusing on finishing a project
  • Excessive/Inappropriate Guilt: They feel that they are not enough and have not done enough for their loved ones.
  • Irresponsible Behavior: They usually turn in assignments on time, but they start missing deadlines.
  • Loss of Interest in Food/Compulsive Overeating: They are skipping meals and saying that they are not hungry or they are eating excessively and gaining weight
  • Preoccupation with Death/Dying: They talk about running away from everything and/or they start having a fascination with death itself.
  • Sadness, Anxiety, or Hopeless
  • Use of Alcohol/Drugs and Promiscuous Sexual Activity: They start abusing drugs and/or developing an alcohol addiction as a teen. They also care less about their bodies in general, wishing to just feel something through alcohol, drugs, and/or sex.
  • Withdrawal from Friends: They start declining to hang out or making up excuses to skip out on gatherings.

 

What You Can Do

  • Be a Listener: Focus on being there for your friend and listening to what they are going through. Avoid trying to “solve the problem” and try to empathetic to what they may be going through.
  • Encourage the Person to Get Help: Only encourage them to get help if they explicitly tell you they want help. If you push them towards treatment, they may feel that you do not care for them or that they are a burden to you. Present them with the options, but wait for them to take the initiative.
  • Support Them in Their Treatment: If they do decide to seek help, continue supporting them. It could mean accompanying them to their first counseling appointment or just being a positive influence.

 

Take Care of Yourself: Taking care of someone going through depression can be a strenuous task both emotionally and physically. Make sure to set boundaries and be open in communications. Seek support for others if you need it!