Why Mental Health Disorders Emerge in Your Early 20s
vice.com
vice.com
At 21 my life was all in front of me, then OCD, which I had seen symptoms of as a teenager, reared its ugly head and pretty much destroyed my life. I fell into a deep depression and only now almost 7 years later do I feel like I'm getting back to where I was.
For anyone going through hard times, keep moving forward. It does get better. Sometimes tomorrow and next week look pretty bleak, but you never know how you'll feel a year or five down the road.
I love this quote from MLK:
"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
Which does it a bit more justice.
It's advice your Grandma would give, a form of "soldier on". Likewise the advice from friends will often be too broad and frankly unqualified to be useful. Not that love and support isn't important, but your own friends have their own problems, and mental health is often deeply personal, that not even your own family has any hope of understanding the scope of the problem.
Nothing beats direct action against mental health struggles in the form of information you seek yourself. Your brain, set to task on fixing your brain.
Read, watch, listen and learn from experts and non-experts. Learn a few things about how the brain (including emotions) work and what others have done to fix themselves. Then get the ball rolling at your own pace the potential beneficial actions you've learned. If no progress is made then maybe seek professional help, but really, so much is possible on your own, and it's far cheaper and more rewarding to self-repair via your own research.
One quick example here about "emotional first aid". There's a lot of talks on TED and they don't go for long so can be good starting points for further research. Mental healing is a journey of learning as much as possible and applying new methods and perspectives to eventually form a picture of recovery.
http://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hy...
In a job, if your boss just doesn't like you for whatever reason, there's no clear feedback for why you're failing, at least not in the same form you get feedback in school.
For example, on a job interview, the hiring manager will say something vague like "bad cultural fit" when he really means "This candidate knows more than me. If I hire him, then my own job might be at risk."
I always thought "Work hard, study hard, do your best job and things will always work out for you." It's a bit of a shock to realize that's a lie.
I think existentially I would feel a lot better if I got nixed because I was too smart, rather than, for example, not being lucky enough to be culturalized in an upper middle class setting.
I'm not sure if you're being serious here but is it really hard to believe that you might not be a good fit for a company?
For example, if a company told me they like working weekends and 10 hours a day, and I said I value working smart and think that working too many hours leads to poor quality code, I'm pretty sure both of us would think it's a poor fit.
I think school gives the illusion of direction. Tying your mental well-being too tightly to your performance is precarious. In a way, all guarantees are lies that the lessons of living eventually correct.
It's not quite a lie. It most certainly is code for you having applied to the wrong position.
There are plenty of places where the hiring managers will know more than you, or if they don't, understand that specialization is probably going to turn out OK, and that you're not a threat but a possible asset.
> in a job interview, the hiring manager will say
> something vague like "bad cultural fit" when he really
> means "This candidate knows more than me. If I hire him,
> then my own job might be at risk."
On the other hand, some people complain about arbitrary treatment in school, too. I can't think of any egregious experiences like that for myself. Maybe these complainers are the type who make excuses for their own failings? Maybe school vs. adult work isn't a good contrast after all? Anyway, I found it a better analogy than you're giving it credit for.
Also, I think your tone is a bit strong. Maybe you didn't mean to, but it sounds like you're accusing this person of having "underlying issues with social interaction" and that they often feel they're mistreated by others and are superior to them. That seems uncalled for, given that the original text wasn't that direct or personal. It was just an example. If you feel that it implies a certain attitude of the author that you feel needs correcting, there might be more helpful ways to say it.
The same works for employers, employees, and co-owners: they want people with whom they can connect enough so that they can work with them. If you do connect with a person, you end up hanging out with him/her, and this opens the door for creativity and new ideas and projects.
Conversely, nobody wants to spend time with people they don't particularly like or connect with, even if they are highly skilled. Interviews are always very personal in the end, even if people want to back up their choices with seemingly rational and objective analysis. That's why there's an array of diplomatic answers to why the candidate was rejected. But basically it often comes down to "I didn't get a good feeling of him", and that hunch is likely to be correct in most cases (I'd personally venture to say "in all cases") but you're not allowed to say it aloud.
In life you don't win by getting the numbers right: you win by letting go of too much idealism, seeing instead what works 1) for real and 2) for you, and then by hopping on to the right carriages while journeying on.
That crap doesn't need to be in the article. I had a ton of trouble in my early 20s becuase unlike every other person in my family, I wasn't an uber high achiever (despite trying really hard). I eventually realized that I had literally no role models that were, you know, normal, average people. You aren't a failure just because you aren't a CEO and are never going to be one. That is something I had to learn. And my family was just upper middle class. I imagine it can get much worse than I had it.
If so, I strenuously disagree. Stress is all relative, and the difficulty of adjusting to adulthood comes from the change, not the absolute situation you're in.
I won't deny that working to put yourself through school is going to be extremely difficult. But if you've been holding down jobs since the age of 14 to help your family eat, it's just more of the same. It's difficult, but there's not much adjustment to be made.
On the other hand, if you lived a nice stress-free life with your wealthy parents helping you out at every turn, and then suddenly you're 18 and on your own and you're starting to realize that your professors don't care who your parents are and you have to buy food yourself and you might actually need to look for a job at some point because mom and dad won't support you forever, that's a big adjustment. The poor guy might kill to be in your shoes, but that doesn't mean it can't be just as stressful, or more, for the rich guy.
You can certainly argue that it shouldn't be stressful, that the rich guy should take a moment to reflect on how fortunate he is, and be happy. But that's not what happens.
The rich person's problem is more likely to be having no self esteem and feeling like a total failure because he (she) didn't live up to his parents' unreasonably high standards.
It's better to be hungry than to hate yourself.
It really is. Hunger does not drive people to suicide. Hating yourself does. (Although even that is a huge oversimplification.)
It's also better to work hard than to hate yourself. Hard work, even when you hate the job, is still has an element of being fulfilling.
There is a reason there are a lot of suicides at MIT, Stanford, and so on, and practically none at Local Town Community College or even Mediocre State State University.
It's a given that mental health is difficult to understand and will be for a long time. How can a human fully grasp the pathology of another brain? To get reach even a basic understanding requires a lot of individual time and effort.
But prevention - that's something we all might be able to do something about. Mental illnesses are systemic and build up from patterns of stress that we deal with in youth and adolescence. This researcher mentioned social "risk factors" like poor engagement and sheltering. But I can't help but suspect that the sheer scale of modern society is just not something we are designed to cope with. People thrive with structure, and modern societies give us the curse of too much freedom and not enough guidance.
We're talking about illnesses that cost us $300 billion/year (in the US), more than twice that of all cancers [0]. Some kind of mental illness affects almost a fifth of adults. You can't look at this and not suspect that this is a disease of modernity. If we want to solve it, we need to solve society.
That's a bit bold, sweeping, and maybe tangential, but it's what I wanted to say.
[0] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/cost/index.shtml
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, but a major part of prevention is awareness, so I'm all for all the PSAs possible.
I wonder if it actually is better to get "help" (meaning psychiatric treatment) sooner rather than later. Does getting put on a bunch of pills really help people in the long run? It could in fact impede the spontaneous remission the interviewee mentions.
This is because you tend not to diagnose children (people under 18) with a definite fixed label. This is because children and young people are going through so much anyway.
Also, services for children are worse than services for adults - less funded, busier, less capacity.
There are no quick cures. If you have symptomology get help sooner than later. What kind if help?(see an expensive psychology/psychiatrist for help. What help--I don't know?)
Schizophrenia and bipolar are More closely related to genes if a parent is affiliated. Anxiety and depression are not so closely related to genes.(No stats given)
If anxiety arises in your twenties you probally had it as a kid.(Not in my case.)
If you do have a mental disorder in your twenties most of you will get better with time.(I found this to be true, but it so seriously disrupts your current life, you might spend the next decade, or more rebuilding the mess. Personally, I feel if a person becomes afflicted all treatment should be made freely available(paid by government), student loans should be forgiven immediately, along with any other shinanigans(within reason) you got yourself into while sick. If you know someone who's suffering--reach out, or the very minimal don't take advantage of that vulnerable person. My sister took advantage of me when I was at my worst. She now wonders why I don't call.)
I lost most/all my friends because of my antics, and (barely) graduated (6 years for a BS, god I'm an idiot).
Things have settled down now though- I'm in my mid-20s and work a lame job. I keep to myself and shitpost on the internet.
Parts of your experience mirror mine pretty closely -- if you can, focus on the fact that you pulled through it, even if it was ugly for a while. Like you said, "things have settled down," so now you can focus less on arresting your death spiral and more on heading in a direction you want to go.
You dragged yourself through depression, stress, academic failure, and whatever else you had going on, and you made it out the other side. There are lots of folks like us who didn't.
You can suffer setbacks every day, but you haven't actually lost until you stop breathing. You cannot build strength without suffering, and you cannot overcome without strength.
This can be something as simple as resisting a temptation (saving money instead of splurging), to something more complex like a routine activity that your body tries to reject (such as exercise or keeping the house tidy). The most difficult is discipline over your own thoughts (which tend to change with your mood and emotions), or remaining focused on a distant goal when daily progress is difficult to measure.
> The most difficult is discipline over your own thoughts (which tend to change with your mood and emotions),
I think thoughts come before and inspire moods and emotions, more than vice versa.
It's hard to maintain discipline over your own thoughts because it's like trying to redirect the Amazon river with a teaspoon. It tends to be more effective to try to gently steer it in a certain direction, or try to quiet it altogether (meditation).
Most people just need to be aware of their mental health and to have chats with employers and friends when things dip; and to build resiliance (social support etc).
Some people would benefit from a talking therapy. We know that counselling probably isn't very good. We know that other forms of therapy are better. Cognitive behaviour therapy is the most well known. This can be self-guided from books[1], or computer programs[2]. Or you can find a therapist. In England this is free on the NHS. Either see your GP and firmly ask for a referral, or search for your county name and IAPT (improved access to psychological services). They're often called "Let's Talk" or similar. You should be able to self refer. If you want something different or if your local IAPT stuff isn't flexible enough you can go private. BACP is one reputable registration body for psychological therapists. Sessions cost roughly between £20 to £50. Most courses should last 14 weeks or less. People with strong phobies can achieve long lasting remission with just a few sessions.
Wah. It's not. Unless you sit around obsessing about how hard it is, life generally works out.
Don't get me wrong, it's not always fun. And it's not always apparent until after the fact, but things tend to work out as long as you don't give up.
Phrasing it as "things tend to work out" is unbelievably misleading. It makes it sound like things have a mind of their own and you can just sit on your butt watching TV and you'll be OK. Things don't tend to work out, people tend to make things work out.
> life generally works out
Parenting, in the vast majority of cases, works out just fine, but no-one will try and pretend it isn't hard.