Is ‘Crisis’ Thinking About Youth Mental Health Doing More Harm Than Good?

Crisis. Fatalistic. Overwhelming.

That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.

They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.

One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.

Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.

These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.

“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”

What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?

Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.

“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”

Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.

“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.

But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.

“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”

Changing the Narrative

Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.

Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.

“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don’t fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”

View From a School District

Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.

Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.

“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”

Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.

It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.

While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.

“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”