What is the Child Mental Health Crisis?
Mental illness is finally starting to be a topic more openly spoken about, but this doesn’t mean we don’t have a long way to go. As adults, seeking treatment is often a hard step to take, and not only that but with suicide and mental illness rates rapidly rising, there is no guarantee you will be able to access immediate help. So for children, we can only really imagine the difficulty of finding and then actually accepting help.
We all tend to view kids view as innocent and carefree souls, which is probably why mental illness and suicide are not always noted or treated in childhood years. We need to be aware and notice these symptoms as the child suicide rate increases every year. Especially in this current climate, we are all more vulnerable than ever and should support one another by facing these problems head-on.
Being a kid isn’t easy. We often presume that children don’t have any worries or difficulties purely because, in comparison to adult life, we view a kid’s life as simple, with no mortgage, no job, and therefore no stress. Wrong. It’s this attitude that we have that prevents us from noticing the internal pain a child may be going through. This is where it’s hard because we want to believe our kids would come and speak to us, but if they don’t understand it themselves and are feeling isolated, they probably won’t. Now we know this, we should try and step in and be mindful of the new stresses kids now face.
The first major and probably the most significant stress is social media. Imagine growing up in today’s generation. Technology and social media consume children and make all their problems and insecurities inescapable. The bullying won’t stop but only get worse when they come home and the posts by Instagram models, constantly making kids feel physically inadequate, won’t disappear. Social media isn’t all bad, and it’s a great way of entertainment and interaction, but we’re handing out access to these platforms to kids of younger and younger ages and giving them access to environments that can become toxic.
Also, the competitive school environment is more intense than ever, with an insane amount of pressure on children to get the grades and go to University. Suicide rates often increase around exam time, showing that this pressure is getting too much for kids and overpowering them. But we know everyone is unique and not necessarily academic, so why is society still pushing kids all in the same direction?
Technology is rapidly improving, and the next generations are dealing with a very different childhood than we did. This is all happening so fast and making the generational differences between parents and kids feel much bigger, making it harder for us to understand the current stress that children currently go through.
As parents, as long as we are aware of these barriers and can notice signs and symptoms of depression and suicidal thoughts, we can intervene early, which can genuinely save lives.