Dear Parents: The Kids Might Actually Be Alright – Charlotte Magazine

Our attempts to destigmatize mental health may have made us overanalyze and overmedicate normal teenage angst

I am allergic to lithium.

I discovered this at 14, in an adolescent psychiatric facility.

My parents had attempted to have me admitted for months. They saw my hormonal teenage attitude, growing rebellion, and occasional marijuana use as indicators that something was wrong with me. Every time I was sent home after an intake evaluation, my mother seemed furious with defeat.

As I entered puberty, I was not prepared for how relentlessly annoying everyone and everything would become. That the color of my bedroom or what was served for dinner could spontaneously generate a tearful, enraged level of dissatisfaction. No one told me that my mother—from whom I sought comfort when I was sick, sad, or hurt—would become so intolerable that I would struggle to stomach the sound of her voice. Or that I would perceive every adult around me as utterly stupid and against me. The only thing adults told me was that my body was changing. But that felt like a footnote.

My parents responded to my irritability as if it were an unnatural, personal flaw. I heard, “What is wrong with you?” with the same regularity that the average person hears, “How are you?” My mother schlepped me to a therapist and told her how disappointing and hurtful I had become. While my friends were blowing off hormonal steam at sports or hanging out with each other, I was going to talk therapy or confined to my house.

Growing up and away from my mother upset and angered her. My father reserved his intensity for my academic efforts, reacting to a B grade or a loose paper in my backpack without the proper folder the way some fathers might react to finding a boy hiding in their daughter’s bedroom.

Ours was a battle for control, masquerading as deep care and concern. It became a personified battle of Newton’s third law of motion: For every constraint and attempt at control, there was an equal ratcheting up of rebellion. The more they resented and resisted my attempt to individuate, the more urgent my desperation to get away from them. The more they criticized and pushed my performance, the more I wanted to fail. The more they clamped down, the more dangerous my attempts to thwart them.

That’s how I was finally admitted to the psych ward at 14. My rebellion eventually delivered the consequences that my parents were seeking to avoid. The big, bad wolf-boyfriend that they hated (the very reason I chose him) lured me into a perilous situation that cost me my innocence and depleted my will to fight. Back into the asylum I went.  

This was 1995, the era of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and the emergence of multiple classes of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). But it seems that no one heeded Wurtzel’s lament for an overdiagnosed and overprescribed generation. 

Since then, young people have grown more anxious, depressed, and afflicted than ever. In 2021, the National Institute of Mental Health reported that an estimated 49.5% of adolescents had a mental disorder. Evernorth Health Services, which operates the mail-order pharmacy Express Scripts, reported a 38% increase in antidepressant prescriptions for teenagers from 2015 to 2019, compared to a 15% increase for adults.

But now that I’m a mother myself, of two kids about to reach their teen years, I’m compelled to wonder: Are teenagers really suffering more from mental and emotional disorders, or are they just diagnosed more—and prescribed more medications to manage (justify) the diagnoses?

Was I? My bipolar disorder diagnosis at 14 was common among the girls in the ward nearly 30 years ago. In fairness, there’s a great deal of crossover in symptoms with general adolescence and manic depression—mood swings, agitation, loss of interest, apathy, impulsivity, risk-taking behaviors, an inflated sense of knowledge or ability, poor judgment. But that’s what makes the adolescent ward of the mental hospital so unremarkable. Anyone of qualifying age could be a candidate.

Dragging a child into unnecessary mental health treatment can harm them. After lithium caused a severe allergic reaction, I was put on Depakote, used to treat bipolar manic episodes. A year later, a new doctor said I wasn’t bipolar and switched me to the antidepressant Zoloft. I was told medication would make me act and feel better, but the only thing it did was make me feel nothing at all. No one yet knew that these drugs being forced upon me, for conditions I did not have, would play tricks on my underdeveloped brain. Often, when children take these drugs, they create the problems they were meant to treat.

I was not bipolar, nor did I have clinical, chemical-imbalance depression. But once I was medicated as if I did, death seemed the only logical next step. It became an emotionless obsession, like a song stuck in my head. This meant more hospitalizations, more psychiatric care, more attempts to fix a problem that didn’t exist until people insisted that it did.

It took me almost a decade to claw my way to autonomous living. It was the one act of rebellion that served me. There are a lot of benefactors when a broken kid needs fixing—and a lot of predators, too.

My husband and I work hard to parent the children we have, rather than parent in extreme opposition to our own pain from childhood wounds. I strive (and often fail) for what clinical psychologist and author Dr. Shefali Tsabary calls “conscious parenting.” She describes a conscious parent as “the parent who dares to raise themselves first, who looks at the dynamic they have with their children as a mirror to all their own unresolved baggage.”

This is not easy. When one of my children exhibited signs of anxiety, my husband’s suggestion that I was causing it was not met warmly. I reached out to BASE, a local cognitive behavioral therapy practice, to see if they could help my child. I learned that they offer a “Parenting Children with Anxiety” course. Rather than stick my kid in therapy, I decided that the course would be a more conscious parenting choice.

Turns out: It was me. Is my kid prone to anxiety? Yes. But my own impatience was causing and exacerbating the issue. I was trying too hard to shield or protect my child from any perceived threats, in the process reinforcing the idea that they were threats. The course helped me realize they usually weren’t. When I changed myself, it changed my kid.

If you’re a parent concerned about your child’s mental health, start your investigation on the premise that you’re the problem and work from there. The more indignant that statement makes you, the more likely it’s true, as was the case for me.

Our culture has made great strides in normalizing discussion and treatment of mental health issues. But I fear it’s gone too far with kids. It’s normal for adolescents to have mood swings—to be sad, combative, restless, or anxious. It’s scary to watch the hormonal transformation and wonder if you’ve lost the happy, carefree child you once had. But kids and parents need to know that, just as not every cough is a sign of COVID, not every unpleasant feeling and rebellious act is a symptom of mental illness.

Certainly, teenagers today face stressors I never did, like the countless complications of the smartphone and social media. But rebellion, substance use, self-harm, and risky behavior are reactionary coping mechanisms. They indicate problems in kids’ environments, the expectations put upon them, or something they have endured. In other words, the problem is external, not internal. I sent this thesis to three friends who work as therapists and psychologists for children and adolescents. They all emphatically agreed.

So perhaps the kids are alright. It’s the rest of us that have some healing to do.

AMANDA PAGLIARINI HOWARD is the digital coordinator.