Why Children And Teenagers Struggle With Mental Health | Confronting Youth Mental Health Part 1/2

there was once i was doing like math in the school canteen and then i got like everything wrong i just broke down for three hours in front of everyone i was just crying and crying and crying and crying at that point our time i felt really numb i started uh self-harming because i felt like it was the only thing that i could feel i knew that what i was doing was quite bad but i felt like nobody cared about me when i was having suicidal thoughts what was going through my mind was that i just need this pain to stop from 2016 to 2020 more than 460 young people in singapore under the age of 30 died by suicide in 2020 the suicide rate among those under 19 rose one recent study on depression showed that youths aged 10 to 24 made up the fastest growing number of diagnosed cases here that's practically our generation or close to it so it was deeply worrying to me and my co-producers chew tong and ryan why was this happening youths are always seen as like oh you're going through a rebellious state when we just label them we may miss out what their behavior is telling us to find out what's causing this mental health crisis among gen z we reached out to them on instagram tick tock reddit and through community groups hi it's christy here the response was surprisingly open and painfully honest my first panic attack during an exam like my entire body just shake so violently it was so bad that i had to be carried on a wheelchair but i had suicidal thoughts and all that because of school because of my religion because of my sexuality and i just feel like even if you die or something people wouldn't care it seems to us this is a generation that just wants to be understood and in my view that makes this documentary something that every parent teacher and peer needs to see since the pandemic started so much of life has changed and i think that's why mental health as a topic is something that a lot of people are talking about right now yeah for sure and i think i'm thinking about our gen z's in particular we found this recent global survey that showed 46 of them actually felt stressed all or most of the time yeah i think that's something that a lot of our youth reflected as well one of them actually said that he was so affected by the pandemic that he had to actually stop school completely jinnah was in his first year of junior college when the pandemic struck i guess when circuit breaker came right there wasn't a lot of activities most of the time you're just talking about like homework oh when when we have to finish this lecture you know like we have to finish this tutorial it wasn't really like those heart to heart friend kind of like conversation so at the time i felt really really isolated at the same time he was feeling overwhelmed by his academic workload initially i just kind of like brushed it off because i thought it was common for jc students who is going through the curriculum to face similar sort of like pressure so all this actually led to a lot of sleepless nights crying a lot of um overthinking basically i started to hyperventilate and he decided to take a break from school for me it was not that i didn't want to study it was that i saw my mental health really like holding on to that last straw already the pandemic was very stressful for many like children but you know even before kovite 19 there was already growing concern that the pressures of life were getting to our younger generation a study showed that between 2013 to 2018 the number of youths aged 10 to 24 who were diagnosed with depression actually increased four-fold and that's a more rapid increase compared to any other age groups and because gen z practically grew up with and on social media research worldwide has linked its rise to a rise in mental health issues really i like to come to parks where i can just be by myself and be the nature and just collect my own thoughts and since i'm here why not do a tick tock you gotta find the perfect angle okay period [Music] i was facing a lot of struggles with my academics and also i was facing quite a few like friendship problems so i think that added a lot of pressure and made me feel like i have to find other alternatives to fit in i think i had instagram since i was like in birming4 you know the classic like who has the most followers who has the most amount of likes i get that was something that i also resort to to like try to make friends or try to stay relevant and there are some period of times where there isn't enough likes i would choose to like take down the photo later on oh there's this function where i will hide like how but it was in the past i tied my self esteem to like the amount of likes i was getting and i i always ask myself am i like not enough why can't i get this um body that they have why can't i get this amount of friends the harshest blue came when friends commented on her size in her post she fell into depression and cut herself when she was just 11. and upon our time i felt really numb i started self-harming because i felt like it was the only thing that i could feel i knew that what i was doing was quite bad but i felt like nobody cared about me these days after receiving treatment for her depression and anxiety jermaine's perception of social media has changed social media is like a highlight reel for everyone so they just only post like the good things and like not the bad things by that point of time i didn't really know that i compared like the highlights to like um the cons and like the not so happy moments in my life i think i start to not really care about what people think about me i just have fun so the likes and the amount of photos i have don't really define who i am indeed social media plays a huge role in the lives of gen z and i think from germain's story we can tell that some of them do end up basing their self-worth or self-identity on it but the question is is social media the biggest factor that causes them to feel worse about themselves or their lives from our chats with youths and counsellors the answer was very clearly no it would seem that social media actually exacerbates underlying issues like academic pressure or poor friendships and for most of the youths that we spoke to the problems happened in real life and very often from family so when i was in j1 i remember like my grades were so bad it was like b-u-s-s-s or something and i was like wow this is a joke i'm taking my exam next year and i'm like okay i can't even get into uni law j-1 this promos i had 1.1 percent for gp so it means i was really the lowest in the cohort and then my math was always so bad there was once i was doing like math in the school canteen and then i got like everything wrong i just broke down for three hours in front of everyone like i was just crying and crying and crying and crying karen's mental health breakdown came in junior college but the pressure to do well started much earlier on when she was in primary school when i was younger my mom she would like came me should be very punitive sometimes her words might be very hurtful but to her mom pushing karen to do better was well intended love became very conditional from my end because i felt that i had to be something and love it can be taken away from me anytime and any like mistake that i made i wasn't able to see myself beyond you know like my achievements in life sometimes they may just then you know dabble into more sort of unhealthy coping styles to either numb their senses or to stimulate themselves so they don't think about some of the problems at home with karen's sense of self-worth tied up in expectations of her things came to a head in jc i started asking myself like am i even justified to be on this earth to cope with her emotions she began to harm herself like i couldn't remember if there was a time where i didn't have like cards on my on my on my body in zoe's case high expectations went to an even greater extreme i have been having suicidal thoughts since i was like four years old six years old because of all my childhood circumstances my mom is a music teacher when i didn't do well or like i missed the note she would like drag me out to the main hall and it should start cleaning me he's like rapping then like i told her like and she wouldn't stop until i peed myself i'll like sit there like my pants wear and i'll be like oh my god when's this going to stop by the same time i i felt that the problem wasn't me so once the kids or the youth experience all this physical punishment i think a lot of them are made to feel like they are wrong or they're inherently bad somehow so this is what impacts on their self-identity at this point i can imagine some of the older viewers watching they might be wondering what's the big deal you know why can't they just suck it up and i do hear these dismissive comments about this generation not being a resilient one or they're very fragile and sensitive but here's one interesting thing that we found during research there's something else that's formative at this age biology has a huge role to play in how teens react to pressures in life and no i'm not talking about hormones i'm talking about their brains this part of the brain that's responsible for making sense of complex things in life helping us to make rational decisions is the prefrontal cortex for teens this important part of the brain is not fully developed yet so when pressures like fitting in or doing well in school increase at a much faster pace than a prefrontal cortex can develop the teen brain is overloaded which means they tend to make a lot of decisions that don't make sense to let's say adulthood they might make decisions that don't have a logical sort of consequence to it they might be more risk-taking as well i i suppose the self-worth is really fragile primarily also because it's still growing and it's still developing feeling overwhelmed and making emotional decisions over and over we saw these two themes being repeated in the stories of many youths that we spoke to for example ryan i was really bullied because of the way i looked and the way i sounded because i had a very high pitched voice and caught me a lot of memes the bullying began when ryan was 13. i also actually tried to talk to the teachers and even the principal but they say that what makes you so sure they're talking about you or you're just being too sensitive it started affecting my daily life like i don't dare to eat alone even like in hawker centers in shopping malls i don't even have to shop alone it was very bad and i think it led to a lot like self loafing the first lowest point would be 2012 when i attended sexual drowning i think because the bullying got too much and i think no one helped me i still remember my school classmates said this you know why not date yet then things turned around when he graduated from secondary school and met friends who were accepting of him i think i found hope and that no matter what happens there is a place where i belong it's just we stand for something very simple things will get better today he runs his own youth mental health group which aims to promote mental health awareness among young people i just feel like i'm not normal who grew up knowing he was different from other boys struggled with his identity the bullying made it harder to accept himself i feel like i couldn't talk to anyone at the point of time i had a schoolmate who was openly gay and he was bullied very badly call him names some of you like gay boy or [ __ ] what is that aqua is it even though it wasn't directed to me i kind of felt it it's also because i didn't know a lot of people who were like me so i had all these thoughts all by myself so i guess over time it builds out industry shazwan was eventually diagnosed with depression when he was 18. this lgbtq plus community they do face more stresses or extra stressors that the about if i may say the larger community may not what i usually term this would be like a minority stress model you know is where when you're in a minority group you tend to face more stressors and more precious as compared to let's say the majority they may not have this ability to also be so open about themselves whether it's within family settings work settings or even school settings so a lot of times you can imagine them growing up in environments where they're either hiding themselves or pretending to be someone that they're not and these then lead to a very natural sense of depression anxiety in verity's case it didn't take bullies for her to feel poorly about herself just societal messaging she was 12 when she developed anxiety over her weight which later turned into an eating disorder at some point i was also afraid like even lower like raw vegetables such as like pumpkin well i wouldn't allow myself that at all at school they would weigh us like every half a year oh my god i hated those so then the girls would be like oh how much you how much do you weigh and it was so annoying and yeah that just made me all the more insecure so i remember quite clearly that one day i was walking through the mall and then this weight loss clinic was advertising their services and they had this rectangular standi so on the left column was heights in like cm and on the right column was your supposed ideal weight i looked at it i was going by and i said ah i'm i'm 5 kg over maybe there's something wrong with me like what am i lacking what part of me is not holding up to the standards that society is upholding she began dieting then it escalated to eating just one meal a day cutting out carbs on top of daily gym sessions it started to affect other parts of my life i became really scared of going out to eat and it stems from the fact that oh i started to get a lot of anxiety just being outside around people especially in like a food setting as her weight plunged so did her mental health every day was just the same old thing of thinking of food sleeping thinking of food exercising and it just felt like a life not worth living at that point so i my mind turned to thinking of dying a lot of times in all these stories that we've heard so far the underlying issue is how self-worth is being undermined and there can also be some extreme cases where this can be a result of physical attacks one thing that really surprised me was how many youth cited sexual harassment sexual trauma as reasons to why they are struggling with mental health and it was not just one or even two cases i looked at some official stats did you know that in 2020 there were 261 investigations into alleged child sexual abuse and that's three times more than it was in 2011. and those are just the cases that are investigated by the child protective service what about harassment that happens in public settings like schools you know we've seen headlines of courtroom cases but imagine all the instances that go unreported just like what happened to zoe the first time it happened was in jc one year i was having a cca meeting the captain of the team he started to like touch my upper thigh like inappropriately in front of the teachers but then i felt like i couldn't do anything about it i don't know like i just thought maybe it wasn't so bad you know like i didn't get raped in june of my jc2 year we were in like a cca party and then like he just touched my right boob and then like i was so shocked what do i do now like happen again when she finally decided to speak up about what happened it was like the victim blaming because i had like one church leader who said oh like if he touched you once okay like that's not your fault but if you touch your second time that's your fault because you didn't see anything or like my dad who told me like don't report it because you don't want to ruin his future at the end of the conversation he saw how like i was crying he was trying to cheer me up but man he did it wrongly he he said like maybe he touched me because you were pretty and i thought that if i was assaulted because i was pretty then i wish that i wasn't pretty [Music] i couldn't look at myself in the mirror i didn't really know how to dress myself anymore after that i got really really suicidal i thought that if people were treating me like i didn't matter then perhaps they are right and that i don't deserve a place in this world during the depressive episode i lost five kilos in one and a half months and i didn't get my period for five months it was irrational but i just told myself like maybe if there was less of me then i can like slowly vanish i know i go home i'm gonna get beaten up i'm ready for the war being laid home or slouching was enough to earn nourish a beating it started when he was in primary school i thought why is my dad beating me up is it for me to become more tougher or like what i was like he slapped me now after a while years so he's just pumped palm what does he teach me i felt like i didn't want to be there anymore trapped to get away from problems at home naresh joined a street gang eventually he ended up in a youth rehab center where he saw a psychotherapist i have ptsd like anyone and everyone if they come near you yeah they come near me i will like the flashbacks and all i will be triggered when we are speaking to the youths it can be quite painful when they share so candidly about their experiences but often they turn around and assure us that actually they're able to talk about it now because they're in a better place and they got help the fact that we were able to produce this documentary and have so many of them willingly come forward to share their stories it's already a sign of hope in itself i believe a generation ago admitting that you have mental health challenges would have been really shameful or seen as some kind of taboo but these days let's say even on tick tock you see young people sharing so openly about their mental health and i think it's so important because it reminds others that they are not alone good question first off i'd like to say that you should be really proud of yourself for the fact that you're trying to do something with your mental health journey i believe that speaking about it it's not just about destigmatizing but it's really about creating the sense of awareness i find that when people have a sense of awareness that's when change and choice can happen the second important lesson is that things do get better every youth that we spoke to managed to seek help and they actually found it i think life will still get rocky for them but they've learned to manage ups and downs a lot better i didn't want to look back on my life and think like wow like this guy really screwed up my life like i didn't want him to have that control over my life and like i want to give myself a shot that's why i went into counseling zoe eventually received psychiatric treatment at the imh for complex ptsd actually last week i just completed my 59th session and next month will be my last session the biggest difference for me before and after is that i never knew of a possibility where i wouldn't be so tormented by suicidal low self-esteem thoughts of being worthless i never thought that i would one day be able to cope with it so well i guess it was the change in the environment in poly i kind of get to make a lot of new friends from there and they were very open about sexuality i think that's one of the major turning points like really making me accept myself more like i'm not alone like it's okay to be this way two very good years of not feeding myself enough over exercising myself over stressing myself and it just built up inside me it was the lowest point but it was also a turning point i had the support of my mom she started trying to understand me more she would buy all these like pastries and breads for like tea and then she'll encourage me to eat them even though sometimes i mostly say no i think her act of just doing that for me really helped me open up and and and made me realize she's there for me even though she might not understand everything she's doing her best guys so we are back today as for karen she sought help from the child guidance clinic at the imh and graduated last year with a psychology degree with hopes to help others who are struggling naresh on the other hand also got professional help for his ptsd and is now mentoring other kids with difficult circumstances through boxing so i'm looking back on you are you proud of yourself i'm really proud of myself now it's my turn to inspire the boys be there for this use like how i wanted to someone to be there for me when i was youth the journey to getting help however can be a complicated one they assumed that i was possessed my parents actually lied to me you know saying that like oh you're gonna visit like a friend but it turned out to be an exorcism at one point i was taking out three jobs on campus to try and sustain this like psychotherapy treatment there was another feeling of resentment what have i done to deserve this you have done your best for your child and and you have given them the best of care and how could this happen to my daughter join me in episode 2 of this special on youth mental health as i find out the challenges the young people face in seeking help and how to make it better [Music]

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 99,756

Keywords: CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, People stories, Asian perspectives

Id: B2_fhjTxEJU

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022