The most recent Time Magazine cover brings the crisis of
"Anxiety,
Depression and the American Adolescent" to the forefront. We know there's a problem with technology, but what else? I asked myself this question as I traveled through out Southeast Asia
earlier this year. I taught yoga to 300 Buddhist teenage nuns in Burma for a
week with 3 other yoga teachers, and chronicled my travels in the On The Mat Yoga Blog.
The blog entry I did not write was about the contrast
between American adolescents and the teenage girls I met and taught in Burma.
Though these girls had relatively little in both material wealth and family,
they were not depressed or anxious. The girls we taught were safe from many of
the ills of Burmese society including the dangers of sex trafficking and
undocumented citizenship for many were rescued from the Hill Tribes where
families are broken apart by abuse, drugs and poverty. Many were still
without their parents or siblings, still orphans, and yet they were content.
Girls smiled, laughed and shared hugs without any trace of the depression and
anxiety seen in America's teens.
I did not realize that there was science to support the
importance of this internal connection until I read Lisa Miller's The
Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Lifelong Health and Thriving
where she presents 15 years of empirical scientific research affirming the
importance of a personal and natural spirituality in the prevention of
depression, substance abuse and high risk behavior in adolescence. In her work
as the head of Clinical Psychology at Columbia Teachers College, Miller found
that teens with a developed spiritual core were 80% less likely to suffer from
recurrent major depression, 60% less likely to abuse substances, and 70% less
likely to engage in high risk behaviors, including unprotected sex for teen
girls.
These findings will have major implications for the
treatment of adolescent anxiety and depression, but there was no mention of this in the Time article. In addition, Miller’s
work provides not only strategies for the prevention of mental illness in
teens, but also the road map for increased thriving and contentment through the
difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, a process that extends beyond
the teen years. The difference between supporting and fostering this human
trait could be the difference between a teen who struggles with mental health
difficulties, or thrives through the ups and downs of adolescence with resiliency
and trust that all will be well.
A greater question arises when one thinks about the number of college students who arrive their freshman year without the solidity of this spiritual core and are suffering from depression, substance abuse, high risk behavior, an eating disorder, cutting, or another mental health issues. Then what? The teen/young adult is in college, lacks parental support in the immediate vicinity and feels adrift in a lonely world. How might we consider their spirituality?