In working with clients, one of the things I often focus on is a timeline of different events that have happened in their past couple of months or years. Creating a timeline helps me put things into context, as it gives me answers to how long you have been feeling this way or when something big happened in your life.
In creating these timelines, I’ve found that a lot of people struggle to remember things based off of dates. Ask me if I changed jobs in 2019 or 2020, and it might take me a moment to go through different things that happened to try to get the year right. I’ve found, however, that there is one recent event that everyone distinctly remembers and can easily use to create a timeline — the coronavirus pandemic.
With it being April 2022, we are officially over two years into this pandemic, and no matter your political affiliation or viewpoint on whether you should or shouldn’t get vaccinated, I think it’s safe to say that pretty much all of us can use the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns as ways to mark different things. And one of the things I keep hearing about is youth mental health, with the CDC recently releasing a study that states that 44% of adolescents reported “persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.”
I think it’s important to understand how they defined “persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.” To be categorized as such, adolescents reported that they felt “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities.”
When reading this, I thought about two things. The first was how high the number 44% is. That’s nearly half of our young people. It seems that every year that the CDC does this study, the number of young people who feel this way goes up. We need to continue to work on encouraging our young people to engage in things that are positive for their mental health, such as exercise, healthy boundaries with their phones and social media, and being involved in activities and service.
However, the second thing I thought about was how we need to really discuss with our young people the reality that sadness is a normal thing, that it is something we can expect to feel at times in our lives.
Journalist Helen Russell noted the difficulty that many of us have with being sad. In her book “How to be Sad: Everything I’ve Learned About Getting Happier by Being Sad Better,” Russell explores how sadness is a normal emotion. I think that often our young people — and let’s be honest, even us adults at times — think that sadness is bad or something that we shouldn’t experience. We want to be happy, which makes sense because it feels so much better than being sad. But when we emphasize it to the point that sadness becomes wrong or unacceptable, we set ourselves up for failure.
Because of this, when we do feel sad, we think that there must be something wrong with us, that we shouldn’t be feeling this way. Russell highlights that this fear of sadness seems to be a particularly American thing, as other cultures tend to be more accepting of sadness, even seeing it as necessary for growth and change.
In my work as a counselor, I’ve come face to face with this fear of sadness. We fear that if we feel sad right now, we might feel this way forever. We compare ourselves to other people (especially on social media) and think that our lives don’t seem to measure up to theirs.
But if we lean into accepting our sadness and understanding that it is a temporary and necessary emotion, that it’s part of the human experience, then we can be less caught off guard when we feel it.
- Mischa McCray is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist. Send questions or topics you’d like him to discuss to mmccray@wpcgreenwood.org.
