REPORT
Why are our children so sad?
In response to a growing concern that a widely used
class of anti-depressants might increase suicidal thoughts in the first
few weeks of treatment, especially in children and adolescents, the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration has declared that the medications must
carry warning labels.
The concept of childhood depression is a relatively
new one. Ten years ago we were still debating whether kids could be
depressed. Before the mid-1970s, adolescent suicide was rarely reported;
now nearly 500,000 teens attempt suicide each year, according to the New
York University School of Medicine Study Center. This does not mean
children were not depressed in the past. Of course they were. But for
the first time ever, the U.S. surgeon general has declared
"a public crisis in mental
health for children and adolescents."
It seems obvious that children who are hungry,
neglected or frightened to go outside lest they be hit by a stray bullet
would be depressed. It's less easy to understand why we have an epidemic
of middle-class and upper-middle-class children and adolescents who are
so sad and anxiety-ridden that they need to be medicated. Why is this
happening? I do not believe it's because we do not love our children.
But maybe we're asking too much from them. We want them to kick butt on
the soccer field, wow us with their musical talents and bring home
straight A's. Yet we shatter their lives with divorce, and while they're
still reeling, we present them with new families, all the while
insisting they keep up their grades, practice those scales and get the
SAT scores they need to get into the "right" college. We want our
children to be effective communicators, but we often don't want to hear
what they have to say.
We need them to protect us from their truths, to
shelter us from their pain. If they told us how sick they are of our
fighting, how tired they are from the back-and-forth shuffling between
homes, it would tear us apart. They know this, so they keep it to
themselves, which is a good thing, because even if they did tell us,
what could we do about it? We tell our children to "just say no" to
alcohol and drugs while many of us use and abuse them. The Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported recently that
almost 5 million alcohol-dependent or alcohol-abusing parents have at
least one child living at home with them. We expect the children of
these 5 million substance-abusing parents to go about their business and
not get into trouble while their world falls apart around them day after
day. We want our children to recoil from violence, yet the average child
in our country watches 45 acts of violence a day on TV, according to the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Is it any wonder
that so many of our children come to see violence as a way to solve
problems? We expect our teenagers to abstain from sex, yet they live in
a society where sex beckons from every billboard, magazine and TV
commercial.
Although we'd never buy our children pornographic
videos, we invite it into our homes in the form of MTV and the multitude
of other soft-porn shows. We want our children to retain their
innocence, yet we buy our young daughters clothes that sexualize them
long before their bodies have even begun to change. We tell our children
we love them unconditionally, but we show them we love their
achievements as we drive our cars with bumper stickers proclaiming their
honor-student status to the world. We tell our children we love them
just the way they are, but how can they believe us when they see our
fear and loathing of our own aging bodies? Is it coincidence that as our
consumption of anti-depressants is at an all-time high, so are our trips
to the plastic surgeon?
We want our children to be happy, but how happy are
we?
What does happiness look like to us baby boomers?
Does it smell like the leathery inside of a shiny new
car?
Does it look like a 3,000-square-foot home with
granite counters and a mortgage that has us working 60 hours a week?
We're so busy making a living that we don't have time
to make a life. We did not have cell phones, DVDs or the World Wide Web
when we were growing up, but most of us had time. Bet unstructured time,
even in the summer or after school, is a concept with which many of our
children are unfamiliar. Their hours are so tightly woven that they are
left virtually no space to play or daydream. Is it any wonder they're
depressed?
What will it take to make us realize that our mental
health and the emotional well-being of our children need at least as
much consideration as the care of our physique? Perhaps the FDA ought to
come up with a new warning label for the little plastic wristband of
each newborn baby: To avoid irreparable damage to growing human, please
do not subject to years of unnecessary stress.
Brigid Brett
7 June 2004
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/06/06/opinion/commentary/21_04_546_5_04.txt
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