Heath Lambert: In the November 7th edition of Time magazine, Suzanne Shrubsdorf wrote a fascinating article called “Anxiety Depression and the American Adolescent.” The themes of this article touch on exactly the kinds of things that concern us here at ACBC and on Truth in Love. It’s the themes of anxiety, and depression and how those problems are experienced by people in particular in this article in Time Magazine by adolescents in the United States.
The article reports a very significant problem, it reports increasing anxiety and depression on the part of teenagers in the US. Susanna Shrubsdorff reports anxiety and depression in high school kids have been on the rise since 2012, after several years of stability. She goes on to report that girls are at more risk than boys. And she says in 2015, about 3 million teens ages 12 to 17 had had at least one major depressive episode in the past year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. And she later says about 30 percent of girls and 20 percent of boys totaling six point three million teens, have had an anxiety disorder, according to data from the National Institute of Mental Health. So she’s talking about a problem of a growing number of teenagers experiencing depression and anxiety. She also goes on to explain how this problem manifests itself. She spends a great deal of time in the article talking about self-harm about girls and boys who engage in the practice of cutting. And in fact, the article is just as much about cutting as it is about the experience of anxiety and depression itself, as this self-harm becomes, a manifestation of that anxiety and depression.
She [the author] also explains some of the problems that she believes are behind these behaviors. She points to problems in the culture. She says that these adolescents have never known a time when terrorism and school shootings weren’t the norm. They grew up watching their parents whether a severe recession. And perhaps most important, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society. Those problems in the culture give way, as she mentioned, to the problem of social media and online bullying, which she talks about at great length. She also talks about the problem of parental disconnect, that parents today don’t seem to be as connected to their kids as they once were or as they should be. She says parents are also mimicking teen behavior, not in all cases, obviously, but in many cases, the adults are learning to use their phones in the way that teens do. They’re zoning out; they’re ignoring people; they’re answering calls during dinner rather than saying, “Okay, we have this technology. Here are the rules about how we can use it.” So, you see here the problem of social media and the problem of parental disconnect as the parents do the same thing that the kids are doing. And so this is the problem, growing anxiety and depression on the part of adolescence who are even going so far as to engage in cutting and other forms of self-harm. And some of the root causes, as Time Magazine reports, are social media, unique problems in the culture, and parental disconnect from their teams.
What can we say about this from a Christian perspective? The article is clear that there is a problem. What is not so clear in the article is what is the problem. One of the reasons that there’s a lack of clarity about this in the article is because the article has a very limited historical and geographical perspective. We would need to be honest as Christians, who want to think not just nationally, but globally. There are brothers and sisters in Christ, men, and women in the world, boys and girls teenagers all across the world who are struggling with all kinds of problems that we don’t even think about in our relatively isolated context of the United States. There are teenagers in other countries who are exposed to grinding poverty, who are exposed to wars that are ongoing in their own hometowns, and who are having to flee as refugees in their own country of origin. And so we need to be honest that this article, as it focuses even in the name of the article, on American adolescence is fairly limited in the kinds of things that adolescents can deal with all across the world, but it also is limited from a historical perspective. Even as you evaluate the United States adolescents in this country in generations in the past have grown up through a Great Depression. They’ve grown up through world wars and have had to learn the news that their father was killed in battle. African American children have grown up in the 1960s and suffered through Jim Crow. And so, the article, both geographically and historically, even in the United States, is very limited. I don’t know that it’s helpful to speak of adolescents today facing a greater set of problems than adolescents and any other trying time. So I don’t think the article is helpful in making that argument per see, but I do think the article is helpful in exposing the particular kinds of stresses that plague adolescence, the particular factors in our culture that lead adolescents to struggle with the kinds of depression and anxiety that they struggle with. Certainly, teens today who are growing up do face challenges with social media that no other generation face that does pose a particular kind of threat to flourishing in an individual human life that we would want to talk about. And so, in that sense, I’m really thankful for the article, and I think it helps us know how to be more faithful as Christians in general and as parents in particular.
So that means we have to talk about solutions, and this is where the article is really just not that helpful. There’s one inset graphic towards the end of the article that provides some guidance. And there are several nondescript references to counseling throughout the article. But we’re not told what kind of counseling was, and we’re not told about the issues that were addressed in counseling. So there’s not a lot of positive progress by way of prescriptive steps in the article. The article winds up being a very descriptive piece about a very serious problem but doesn’t offer any real help that can allow us to address these problems when we confront them in our lives or with the adolescence in our lives. And so I think we need need, to be honest at this point, that this is what happens in an atheistic culture. This is what happens in a culture that has banned God from the Public Square. This is what happens to a culture that has fled to the godless solutions of secular psychology for help with life’s problems.
The reality is we live in a culture that does not know how to help the most serious and the most obvious problems that confront us. And as Christians, we have to be committed to addressing these problems, that apparently few have the answers to. This really all began in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Before that, there was an understanding in the culture in general, that if you had a problem like anxiety or depression, you had to go to your village Pastor or your village priest. There was no other place to go for care from these kinds of problems. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Sigmund Freud began to do his work of creating a secular alternative to religious care. And that secular alternative took off through the course of the early 1900s. And by the middle of the 1900s, the middle of the last century, you had a situation where Christians had been in retreat, and secular thinkers had been ascendant, and you had Christians from a relatively weakened perspective at that point, trying to look at how to augment the resources of Scripture with the resources of psychology in order to help people who struggle with problems like this. That project didn’t work. And then, by the early 2000s, even just within the last decade, you have seen the evaporation of cultural Christianity. You have seen the ratification of a culture that is entirely secular and now where we are is we have people who don’t understand anxiety and depression. We have people that are without hope and without God in the world, and we are shocked when this leads to the kind of despair that we see in the Time magazine article.
And so, what this article really is a call for Christians to get serious about how to care for people in our midst. Kids in our families’ kids in our churches, grown-ups in our homes, and churches about how to connect them and their problems with the practical love and the relevant care of Jesus Christ. Jesus says in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” those words of Jesus spoken two thousand years ago are just as relevant in 2016 as they were when Jesus said them to begin with. This is a promise from Jesus Christ that when you are weary and heavy-laden, if you come to him, he has a rest for you. This is a promise that our culture doesn’t know and that the church, broadly speaking, has forgotten. It’s a call for us to marshal our resources as a church to grow in the kind of wisdom that connects this care of Jesus to people in pain. We’ve got a lot of work to do on that, and that’s one of the reasons for the Truth in Love podcast; we want to talk about how the wisdom of Jesus and the care of Jesus gets really practical in the context of specific problems. I want to promise you that in the weeks and months ahead, we’re going to deal specifically with some of these issues that are plaguing adolescents. And we want to show you how the Bible springs to life and offers real care for these real challenges. But this is a call to action for the church to grow in wisdom. And another statement from Jesus is in Matthew 5, verse 16, “let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works. and glorify your father who is in heaven.” This is in the midst of Jesus’s call for us to be salt and light, and here he wants our light to so shine that people would see our good works and not give glory to us but give glory to our Father who is in heaven. One of the good works that Christians must do so that our light can shine in this culture is to have solutions to this kind of anxiety, this kind of depression, and this kind of self-harm that adolescents all around us are struggling with. One of the ways that Christians need to let our light shine is by having these kinds of practical solutions to the adolescence in our midst, to the teens that we know who are dying without hope, and without God, in a pit of anxiety and depression. May God help us to grow in wisdom as we do this together.
