“My anxiety makes me feel guilty for everything that happens”, in those words Valentina* sums up how anxiety feels like for her. The 18-year-old student was diagnosed in 2016 when she started doing therapy, a decision made after she had a couple of panic attacks. The student tells that the principal cause of her disease was perfectionism “my parents used to put a lot of pressure on me to get good grades, and as time went by, I began to think like them too, that I couldn’t accept getting a grade below a 9 or an 8”.
Nowadays this perfectionism interfere in her life in other ways and the internet makes it worse: “social media tends to make me feel anxious too, I end up comparing myself with everyone, and I think to myself that I´ll never be like those people, it’s impossible”. Image Source: Unsplash
A recent study by Melissa G. Hunt, published on the journal of and clinic psychology, showed a connection between time spent on social media and disorders like depression and anxiety on people between 18 and 22 years old. “Using fewer social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study.” The relation is simple, when you look at other’s people lives, particularly on Instagram, is easy to conclude that everyone else’s lives is better than yours.
Studies like those are becoming more common each day, and a well-known researcher is Jean Twenge – who is doing studies about differences between generations for more than 25 years – and wrote a book called “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood”.
According to her study, the iGen generation (born between 1995 – 2012) was the first to spent the whole adolescence with cell phones, what caused some effects that aren’t common in others generations: teens were getting together with their friends less often, more began to feel left out and lonely, more started to feel like they couldn’t do anything right, that they didn’t enjoy life. The suicide rate between 12 to 14 years old has doubled since 2017.
Graphic from Jean Twenge’s studies
Beyond the social media issue
It is a fact that social media and the advance of new technologies are a huge part of the problem that anxiety has become in our society, but it’s not the only one. In fact, there are a lot of factors that can lead to this diagnosis.
According to the psychologist Lilian Biasoto, nowadays “there is a need for immediate fulfillment, thus establishing an endless quest for full satisfaction in an organized society with a view to a future that is always in transformation, therefore unreachable, impossible as a real representation”. In other worlds, people in the spectrum of anxiety and depression doesn’t see time as a continuum, there isn’t a waiting time, if what they desire isn’t instantly achieved, then there’s no investment.
This has much to do with the structure of our lives today: “the rapidity of information, the difficulty in stopping and the orientation aimed at always capturing what is to come, converges to a constant dissatisfaction.”
The use of medication has become more common too, which according to Lilian is a way to adjust the patient’s life, of making it capable of functioning as one expects all to function, as a detachment from the model of life we establish and the development of symptoms, which are varied, agitation, tremors, acceleration of the heartbeat, chest pains, nausea, sweat, etc. If one feels like this with certain frequency the indicated is to look for a doctor to discard illnesses and soon a psychologist.
Unfortunately, mental illness is still treated as a taboo, which cause people to not look for help. The 17-year-old student Maria Clara* tell us that before being diagnosed she thought that anxiety was drama. “Thank God I opened my mind and today I understand that it is an extremely serious matter.” On the other hand, the 22-year-old student Daniel* was diagnosed when he was only 2 years old, when he started doing therapy due to a trauma, “it’s all about accepting help, if I didn’t have psychological monitoring I’d be crazy by now”
Anxiety is a serious disease, and no one should ever feel ashamed of it, due to our lifestyle this generation tends to feel more anxious and depressed, if you are feeling uncomfortable with your mental health make sure to look after for professional help.
*student names have been changed to preserve their identities.