TEENS ‘LONELY’ DESPITE SOCIAL NETWORKING
NEW
DELHI: Teen angst is far more real than perceived, with one in five students
aged 13 to 19 saying life is not worth living, found Fortis Healthcare’s Teen
Suicide Survey of 2,364 school-goers. One in four said their families would be
better off without them.
A
representative sample of 2,364 school-going teen-agers was selected randomly. A
structured survey, comprising 20 questions, was used to understand the
different variables associated with depression and suicide. A gender and age
comparison was done, with the age ranging between 13 and 15 years (teenagers in
early adolescence) and between 16 and 19 years (teenagers in late adolescence).
The results were tabulated using appropriate statistical measures.
For
many, talking to dispassionate stranger than friends or family works better, so
do consider counselling for teens if the dark despair doesn’t show signs of
clearing up in a week or two.
Violent outbursts and stroppiness mask
underlying loneliness and despair among the young and connected, shows a Fortis
Healthcare Survey
NEW
DELHI: Teen angst is far more real than perceived, with one in five students
aged 13 to 19 saying life is not worth living, found Fortis Healthcare’s Teen
Suicide Survey of 2,364 school-goers. One in four said their families would be
better off without them.
“Our survey underscored the loneliness
and isolation in the Facebook and smartphone era, where teens are connected yet
isolated because of the superficiality of the status update,” said Dr Samir
Parikh, director of the department of mental health and behavioural sciences at
Fortis Healthcare. Social media, in fact, help mask isolation and depression.
“They cannot replace empathy and attachment behaviour,” said Dr Parikh. I hate
you all and I want to die.” Emotional outbursts and raging tantrums accompanied
by much door-slamming are pretty much a part of the life of every teenager and,
by extension, their friends and family. That’s perhaps why most of us shrug off
these rants as melodramatic overreaction to anything and everything and
complacently assume that when the hormonal spike peters out, so would the
angst.
In
most cases, the trauma does vapourise almost instantly and the everything is
right with the world in a day or two. Friends and family, however, need to
watch out darker signs of underlying hopelessness that could point to an
emerging emotional breakdown leading to self-harm and, in some cases, suicide.
One in three 13 to 19 year olds find life
too hard to cope with and one in four think — albeit once in a while — that
their families are better off without them, found Fortis Healthcare’s Teen
Suicide Survey. For the survey, a representative sample of 2,364 school-going
teens were questioned online and interviewed by the department of mental health
and behavioural sciences, Fortis Healthcare, which also collated the data.
“The
findings highlight the loneliness and social alienation of teenagers even in
the era of social networking and instant connectivity,” says Dr Samir Parikh,
director, department of department of mental health and behavioural sciences,
Fortis Healthcare.
“While
Facebook and other social media are an excellent for sharing, it has also led
to emotions being reduced to a status update. “Like-dislike’, “I’m low-I’m in a
party mood,’’ “friends-frenemy”… The easy labelling has led to the lowering of
emotional bonding and empathy that comes with sharing time together, leading to
physical isolation and despair even among young people who seem to have more
friends than they can keep track of,” says Dr Parikh.
So intense is the loneliness that one in
three — 31% — teens feel that no one can help them with their problems and
almost two in three — 62% — not having spoken to anyone about their thoughts
and feelings, showed the Fortis Survey. Interestingly, among those who had
vented, more than half (55%) turned to their friends for help.
Though
dark and dreary moods rarely convert into self harm, there is no taking away
from the fact that even with the wide under-reporting — largely because attempt
to suicide is punishable with imprisonment under Section 309 of the Indian
Penal Code — India has among the highest in the world, with to about 1.87 lakh
people killing themselves in 2010. Recognising that attempt at selfharm is
driven by despair and helplessness and not criminal intent, the Law Commission
of India has recommended that attempt it be decriminalised.
Most people who hurt themselves are
likely to do it before the age of 30. The Registrar General of India’s data
shows 3% of causes of death surveyed (2,684 of 95,335) in people 15 years or
older were suicide, of which 40% of all suicides in men and 56% in women
occurred at ages 15-29 years, reported Vikram Patel from The London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the Lancet.
“Emotions are intensified in adolescents
by a complex interplay between genetic, biological, psychiatric and
psychosocial factors, which take a trigger to push a child over the edge,” says
Parikh. These factors hold true across the world, reports another Lancet study
on self harm and suicides in teens.
“You have to watch out for the red flags
— looking dejected for a couple of weeks, persistent irritability, social
withdrawal etc — and engage with teenagers to ensure they do not get trapped
into a vortex of despair,” says Dr Rajesh Sagar, additional professor, department
of psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.
Sanchita Sharma, Health Editor,
Hindustan Times (Mumbai) 16 Sep 2012
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dealing with a teen’s dark despair
Teenage
is the most stressful days of our lives,” my son, 15, announced when I
mentioned the ‘what-I-thought-were-shocking
but-psychiatrists-said-were-humdrum’ findings of the Fortis Healthcare’s Teen
Suicide Survey over dinner last night.
“Not
quite, adults have as many stresses,” I defended. “Well, if you have your job,
house and car in place, you have nothing to worry about. We have exams and
relationships,” he said with a Zen-like finality.
“We
have relationships too,” I mumbled. “Yeah, but you all have dumped people and
been dumped, you are used to it. There’s nothing like your first relationship
breaking down. Kids go nuts with grief, this ‘seventhy ’— a class 7 student, to
those unfamiliar with school slang — I know went to pieces,” he said.
Though
the image of an 11-year-old weeping over lost true love may make some of you
snicker, my son’s words pretty much put teen angst in perspective. Every
emotion and experience teens undergo is heightened as they struggle to adjust
to the hormonal and physical changes in their bodies.
My
first encounter with suicide was when a class 8 student in my brother’s upscale
public school in Delhi jumped off the roof because he had done badly
academically and an insensitive teacher had told him he could not let his
parents down this way, more so because he was adopted. Instead of going home to
his very caring parents, the despair of being not good enough made him to jump
off the roof.
My
visibly shocked brother said he was a great kid with really understanding
parents who did not pressurise him to excel at school. They were obviously
shattered and could not understand why a careless — I still think it was
insanely criminal — remark by a teacher their son did not care about could make
him take his own life. She didn’t like him, he’d always said, and he’d appeared
to shrug off her rants in the past. No one knows what thoughts went through his
head as he climbed the three flights of steps to the roof to take his own life.
Several
factors come together to make teens more vulnerable to emotional meltdowns,
show more than one international studies. The Lancet series on suicides puts it
down to biological changes (such as imbalances in serotonin, the ‘happy’
hormone that regulates mood), personality traits such as being impulsive or
over-achieving, and poor social problem-solving skills, which combine with
real-life crises (getting dumped, parents separating, etc) and psychiatric
disorders (depression). Permutations and combinations of these factors make
teens feel defeated and trapped more easily than adults.
Girls
are twice as likely as boys to fall into a downward mood spiral as they undergo
far more hormonal changes during their teens. Depression in young people often coexists
with other mental disorders such as anxiety and disruptive behaviour, or
illnesses such as diabetes, reports the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The
problem, as always, is spotting the red flags in time and helping them get out
of the funk without being intrusive. It’s tough to tell someone — especially an
explosive teen — that they are overreacting and they need to take things
easier. The way to do it is to invite them to talk — “You look low. Things
okay?” — or simply telling them you’re around 24x7 for crisis calls. It works.
Sometimes I get calls at really odd hours from strangers I’ve met for an
article just because they need to vent.
For
many, talking to dispassionate stranger than friends or family works better, so
do consider counselling for teens if the dark despair doesn’t show signs of
clearing up in a week or two.
Sanchita Sharma, Health Editor,
Hindustan Times (Mumbai) 16 Sep 2012
Courtesy (visited 16.9.12)
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