Published originally in Anton Media, Parenting Plus column, August 20 2021, By Kathy Rivera
After working in the mental health field for more than two decades, it should have come as no shock to me when I read some of the negative responses to Simone Biles’ announcement that she was pulling out of the Olympics team competition due to anxiety and other emotional challenges—but it stung, nevertheless.
On social media, TV and other outlets, outraged commenters called her everything from a coward to a quitter to a spoiled brat. Texas deputy attorney general Aaron Reitz went so far as say that Biles was a “national embarrassment.”
Former British TV host Piers Morgan tweeted, “Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke. Just admit you did badly, made mistakes, and will strive to do better next time. Kids need strong role models, not this nonsense.”
Would these naysayers have been so harsh if Biles had pulled out because of a broken foot or burst appendix?
These comments are a clear sign that stigma surrounding mental health issues is still pervasive. Fortunately, however, there was some very positive news: The level of support for Biles from other athletes, celebrities, public figures and everyday people far outweighed the negativity, with many describing her frankness in discussing mental health as brave and inspiring.
Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps, who has been open about his own mental health challenges, put it this way: “We’re human beings. Nobody is perfect. It’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to go through ups and down and emotional rollercoasters. The biggest thing is, we all need to ask for help when we go through those times.”
While few of our children are under the intense public scrutiny as are Biles, Phelps, tennis star Naomi Osaka or the many celebrities who have been discussing their mental health issues, they still face enormous pressures, especially given the disruption and fear brought on by the pandemic.
At North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, we’ve been receiving a growing number of calls from parents concerned about their children and teens’ mental health. Many describe classic signs of depression and anxiety: withdrawal from friends, lack of interest in activities that normally gave them pleasure, mood swings, agitation, sleeplessness (or oversleeping), changes to eating patterns, substance abuse—even thoughts of suicide.
While mental health issues existed in kids long before the pandemic struck (an estimated one in five youth experience a mental illness), I believe we are on the verge of a crisis that may well surpass anything we’ve ever experienced. For many young people, their very foundations were shaken apart during the pandemic, with fear and hopelessness about the future enveloping them to the point of unending despair.
How can you help? The situation with Simone Biles has provided an opportunity for families to discuss stigma and for caregivers to teach kids that no one should ever feel ashamed if they are feeling sad, anxious or emotionally overwhelmed. You can tell your children that Simone was brave to speak out and put her mental health first. You can also let them know that you are there for them, without judgment and with an open mind and heart, whenever they are feeling down.
You can also encourage your schools, religious organizations, medical professionals and other community resources to include discussions about mental health and provide resources for kids who are having difficulties. Don’t hesitate to reach out to mental health organizations like ours for information and support.
Bottom line: It’s everyone’s responsibility to educate themselves about mental health and to stand up to stigma. Let’s use the opportunity surrounding Simone Biles’ brave decision to open up about her struggles to provide our kids with the knowledge, support and understanding they will need during the challenges that lie ahead.
Kathy Rivera, LCSW, is the new Executive Director/CEO of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, Long Island’s leading non-profit mental health organization which has been serving our community for nearly 70 years. The Guidance Center never turns anyone away for inability to pay. To get help for your child or to support the organization’s life-saving work, call (516) 626-1971 or visit www.northshorechildguidance.org.
Last month, family and friends of Jason Witler, a 2011 graduate of Syosset High School, gathered at the high school baseball field to celebrate the life of a young man who died this past April from an accidental overdose of a drug laced with fentanyl. The event, the Jason Daniel Witler Memorial Home Run Derby, raised funds to support the work of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, Long Island’s leading children’s mental health agency, which has an outpatient adolescent chemical dependency program.
Three of Jason’s closest friends—Ashley Sullo, Jordan Slavin and Max Ferro—came up with the idea of the Home Run Derby shortly after Jason’s death, explains Slavin, who had been close to Witler since kindergarten. “Several of us talked about getting together to share memories of Jason, but we realized that he would want us to do something to make people in the community happy, because he loved to make everyone laugh and smile,” Slavin said. “We also wanted to raise money for an organization that was important to Jason and his family that provides help for people struggling with addiction.”
Legislator Joshua. A Lafazan
The trio asked their Syosset High School classmate and Nassau County Legislator Josh Lafazan to help, and he was quick to join the effort, which drew more than 100 attendees. “I am overwhelmed with gratitude to all who came out to show support and participate in the Jason Daniel Witler Memorial Home Run Derby,” Lafazan said. “Working with community partners, we were able to raise thousands of dollars in Jason’s memory to support the critical work that North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center does on Long Island.”
The Journey Of Addiction According to Bonnie Witler, Jason’s mother, her son’s addiction issues began in his mid-teens. “One night, Jason came home after being out with his friends and my daughter came running into my room and said, ‘Mom, come downstairs! Jason’s barred out.’ I had no idea what she meant, but later learned it meant he was high on Xanax.”
For her part, Witler’s sister Dana had seen many friends with addiction issues, so she knew the signs when she saw them in her brother. “Addiction devastates families,” she says. “It usually starts small, with drugs like Percocet and Roxies [both opioids], but eventually they move on to cheaper and easily available drugs, even heroin, because they don’t have the money to keep up with it.”
Sadly, Witler’s addiction struggles are all too familiar for many families on Long Island and across the country. According to government reports, nationwide overdose deaths reached a record 93,000 in 2020. On Long Island, fatal drug overdoses rose 34 percent in Nassau and nearly 12 percent in Suffolk, and many experts believe the pandemic played a role in that increase.
The Witler family from left: Jordan, Dana, Bonnie and Jason (Photo courtesy of the Witler family)
Our country has been facing a worsening and deadly overdose epidemic for the past several years, and fentanyl—the drug responsible for Witler’s accidental death—is a huge factor. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl was involved in more than 60 percent of nationwide overdose deaths last year. “Fentanyl is a powerful pain pill that’s being cut into heroin, cocaine and other drugs,” says Dr. Nellie Taylor-Walthrust, Director of the Leeds Place, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center’s Westbury facility that houses its outpatient chemical dependency program. “It’s up to 100 times stronger than morphine, which makes it extremely cheap—and extremely deadly.”
Mental Health And Addiction Witler’s family sought help from a variety of addictions specialists during his teens. After a year-plus stretch in inpatient rehab, he returned to Syosset High School in his senior year, to the delight of his many friends. He was sober—but Bonnie Witler soon realized that her son’s issues were complicated. “As we were getting ready to shop for Jason’s senior prom, he had a meltdown,” she explained. “I took him to the emergency room, and they said he’d had a manic episode.” This was the first time anyone had suggested that Jason had a mental health condition. “I then knew that he’d been misdiagnosed most of his life,” says Witler.
Indeed, mental health challenges and addiction struggles often go hand in hand, says Taylor-Walthrust. “With the increased number of youth and adolescents seeking treatment for co-occurring disorders, the most effective outcome is to treat both disorders simultaneously,” she explained.
Witler eventually moved to Florida for treatment, and Sullo, Jason’s girlfriend from Syosset, moved down to live with him. He got a job in real estate, and his life seemed to be on the right track. “Jason was doing so well,” Sullo said. “He was clean and sober for five years, and he was dedicated to helping others stay drug-free. He was such a kind soul.”
She shares just one example: “Jason saw a guy he knew from a 12-step meeting at a gas station, and the kid didn’t look well,” Sullo recalled. “Jason made a point to get his number. For weeks, he called him every day, and they went to meetings together. He really cared about other people.”
A Mother’s Grief Turns To Activism No one is sure what happened that caused Witler’s relapse, according to his mother and friends. The pandemic isolation may have been a factor, they say, but that’s only a guess. As for Bonnie Witler, who moved to Florida a few months prior to Jason’s death to be near her son, her devastating loss has been made more bearable by her new role as an activist in the battle against addiction and the fentanyl crisis.
“I call myself a MOM, for ‘Mom on a Mission,’” Witler said, who is an active participant in various committees focusing on substance abuse, mental health and the fentanyl crisis. Witler was honored to be included in Sober House Task Force meetings created in July 2016 by Palm Beach County State Attorney General Dave Aronberg. The task force’s work has led to new regulations of sober homes and treatment centers in Florida that have become the model for other states.
Witler, who recently appeared on WSVN news channel in Florida, is also working with the head counsel of the American Medical Association to lobby congress to pass legislation related to the fentanyl crisis. “Although many drug users have heard about the dangers of fentanyl, their addiction is too strong,” Witler said, “They are playing Russian Roulette.”
She adds that, because of fentanyl, “drugs are now weapons of murder. Dealers are actually charged with homicide.” Acknowledging the widespread impact of addiction, Witler’s sister Dana said, “This is not just a Witler family problem, it’s a community problem, and that’s why sharing his story is so important. People need to realize that there’s help out there. We need to end the stigma, so people don’t think they have to handle this all alone.”
A Community Comes Together The Jason Daniel Witler Memorial Home Run Derby provided a wonderful opportunity for Jason’s friends and family to comfort each other and to honor the life of a young man who cared deeply for others. The community responded in a big way. That day, more than $8,000 was raised, but through the generosity of the incredible people who made contributions in Jason’s memory before and after the event, the total reached more than $35,000, which will support the Guidance Center’s important work.
Ken Witler, Jason’s father, was awed by the large turnout. “It was all because of the hard work of Ashley, Jordan and Max, along with Josh Lafazan and his staff.” He added, “We’re glad that the proceeds will go to the Guidance Center, knowing they will be used to help kids and families struggling with addiction issues.”
Bonnie Witler says that she was “elated” for most of the day at the memorial, as so many young people and parents approached her about how much they felt her son was a part of their family and that “they loved having him around, with his great smile and big laugh.” By the end of the day, however, the grief overcame her as she explained, “It comes in waves, and you have to feel your feelings.” But she feels best when doing all she can to prevent other families from undergoing the tremendous loss that she and her family now live with every day.
“The pain of losing a child is so enormous that some days I just don’t think I can make it,” she said. “But if I can help another life, it gives me reason to go on. Maybe Jason’s life will save hundreds of others.”
—Jenna Kern-Rugile is the Director of Communications at North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center
Since 1953, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center has been the leading community-based not-for- profit specialty children’s mental health organization on Long Island. Their staff is specially trained in working with children and teens (from birth to age 24) and their families. The Guidance Center provides bilingual mental health and chemical dependency services, behavior management, parent education, maternal depression services, suicide prevention, medication management and psychological and psychiatric evaluations, as well as advocacy and care coordination services. They also provide a rapid and thorough response to emergencies through their triage, emergency and high-risk teams composed of their most experienced staff members. The Guidance Center brings hope and healing to the Long Island community and never turns anyone away for inability to pay.
Marissa Pullano, a partner in Jaspan Schlesinger’s’ matrimonial and family law practice group, has been a supporter of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center as a result of her practice in Nassau Family Court. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center ran a day-care center for children and families interacting with the Family Court System. Marissa and the Firm are happy to support North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center in their mission to support the mental health needs of our community’s children and teens and their families.
Helping Kids Manage Stress. Published in Blank Slate Media.
In this monthly column, therapists from North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center answer your questions on issues related to parenting, mental health and children’s well-being. To submit a question, email communications@northshorechildguidance.org.
Question:When I think about my youth, it seems like it was so easy compared to what our children face today. It’s not just the pandemic—although that is certainly an enormous factor—but also the pressures from social media, school, other kids, etc. How can I help my two daughters manage all the stress that they’re facing?
– Missing the Good Old Days
Dear Good Old Days: Many adults reflect on their childhood through rose-colored glasses, remembering fun family vacations, games of flashlight tag, selling lemonade on the corner and all the other good stuff. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with reveling in such memories.
But if we take off those glasses, we’re likely to also remember the pressures of doing well in school, or the bully who made us feel frightened and small, or the fights our parents had over money.
Childhood isn’t now (and probably never was) a scene out of old sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show or The Brady Bunch. We had plenty of stresses to manage as we grew into adulthood. Still, in modern culture, childhood stress has reached a whole new level.
As you said, the COVID pandemic is unprecedented in our lifetimes, and it not only created new and traumatic issues, it magnified the ones that already existed. While losing a normal year of school brought challenges, for many children and teens, school had been a high-pressure zone for years. Today’s youth are often overbooked with extracurricular activities. And, in the biggest change of all, they experience a constant barrage of social media messages that can often make them feel like they’ll never measure up to their peers.
One thing that is essential to healthy development is free time to daydream, but children and teens spend most of their time on digital devices, be it their smartphones, videogames or other tech gadgets.
And COVID isn’t the only worry haunting our children. Kids are not immune to the news on school shootings, climate change and social unrest, with people taking sides and forgetting how to disagree with a measure of kindness and civility.
All of these messages and non-stop activities can be overwhelming. Following are seven ways you can help your children manage their stress level and find balance in their lives.
If your kids are booked with activities and homework from dusk to dawn, ask them if they are feeling overwhelmed. Let them know you will not be disappointed if they decide to lighten their schedule.
While you can’t shield your children from your own stresses, it’s important not to overwhelm them and transfer your anxieties onto them. Be mindful of your language when discussing subjects like financial or health concerns around your kids, especially the little ones.
How you respond to stressors in your life will have a huge impact on how your children learn to do the same. Next time you are feeling overwhelmed, model behavior that can be helpful to your child, such as taking a deep breath, exercising, reading or spending time in nature.
Did your child see something on the news or hear something from friends that scared them? Don’t simply tell them not to worry; talk to them about their fears without judgment and reassure them that your family is safe.
Make sure your child is getting enough sleep. Some quick tips: Eliminate electronics at least an hour before bed; suggest that they read a book, or read with them; and when it’s time to turn off the lights, keep the room dark.
Kids feel more comfortable when the family has routines that they can depend on. One simple idea: Institute family game night, so everyone will experience a fun and relaxing time together.
If they are experiencing signs of depression and anxiety that are impacting their daily functioning, don’t be reluctant to reach out for professional help.
During the pandemic, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center is seeing clients remotely via telehealth platforms or, when deemed necessary, in person. To make an appointment, call (516) 626-1971 or email intake@northshorechildguidance.org.
By Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge. Published in the New York Times, July 31, 2021.
As students return to school in the coming weeks, there will be close attention to their mental health. Many problems will be attributed to the Covid pandemic, but in fact we need to look back further, to 2012.
That’s when rates of teenage depression, loneliness, self-harm and suicide began to rise sharply. By 2019, just before the pandemic, rates of depression among adolescents had nearly doubled.
When we first started to see these trends in our work as psychologists studying Gen Z (those born after 1996), we were puzzled. The U.S. economy was steadily improving over these years, so economic problems stemming from the 2008 Great Recession were not to blame. It was difficult to think of any other national event from the early 2010s that reverberated through the decade.
We both came to suspect the same culprits: smartphones in general and social media in particular. Jean discovered that 2012 was the first year that a majority of Americans owned a smartphone; by 2015, two-thirds of teens did too. This was also the period when social media use moved from optional to ubiquitousamong adolescents.
Jonathan learned, while writing an essay with the technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell, that the major social media platforms changed profoundly from 2009 to 2012. In 2009, Facebook added the like button, Twitter added the retweet button and, over the next few years, users’ feeds became algorithmicized based on “engagement,” which mostly meant a post’s ability to trigger emotions.
By 2012, as the world now knows, the major platforms had created an outrage machine that made life online far uglier, faster, more polarized and more likely to incite performative shaming. In addition, as Instagram grew in popularity over the next decade, it had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality.
For many years now, some experts have been saying that smartphones and social media harm teens while others have dismissed those concerns as just another moral panic, no different from those that accompanied the arrival of video games, television and even comic books. One powerful argument made by skeptics is this: The smartphone was adopted in many countries around the world at approximately the same time, so why aren’t teens in all of these countries experiencing more mental health issues the way Americans have been? Where’s the evidence for that?
This is a difficult question to answer because there is no global survey of adolescent mental health with data before 2012 and continuing to the present. However, there is something close. The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has surveyed 15-year-olds in dozens of countries every three years since 2000. In all but two administrations, the survey included six questions about loneliness at school. Loneliness is certainly not the same as depression, but the two are correlated — lonely teens are often depressed teens, and vice versa. And loneliness is painful even without depression.
So what does the PISA survey show? In a paper we just publishedin The Journal of Adolescence, we report that in 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. We grouped the 37 countries into four geographic and cultural regions, and we found the same pattern in all regions: Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries.
This synchronized global increase in teenage loneliness suggests a global cause, and the timing is right for smartphones and social media to be major contributors. But couldn’t the timing just be coincidental? To test our hypothesis, we sought data on many global trends that might have an impact on teenage loneliness, including declines in family size, changes in G.D.P., rising income inequality and increases in unemployment, as well as more smartphone access and more hours of internet use. The results were clear: Only smartphone access and internet use increased in lock step with teenage loneliness. The other factors were unrelated or inversely correlated.
These analyses don’t prove that smartphones and social media are major causes of the increase in teenage loneliness, but they do show that several other causes are less plausible. If anyone has another explanation for the global increase in loneliness at school, we’d love to hear it.
We have carried out an extensive review of the published research on social media and mental health, and we have found a major limitation: Nearly all of it, including ourown, looks for effects of consumption on the individuals doing the consuming. The most common scientific question has been: Do individual teens who consume a lot of social media have worse health outcomes than individual teens who consume little? The answer is yes, particularly for girls.
We believe, however, that this framework is inadequate because smartphones and social media don’t just affect individuals, they affect groups. The smartphone brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. As smartphones became common, they transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the texture of daily life for everyone — even those who don’t own a phone or don’t have an Instagram account. It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating “notifications.” As Sherry Turkle wrote in her book “Reclaiming Conversation,” life with smartphones means “we are forever elsewhere.”
A year before the Covid-19 pandemic began, a Canadian college student sent one of us an email that illustrates how smartphones have changed social dynamics in schools. “Gen Z are an incredibly isolated group of people,” he wrote. “We have shallow friendships and superfluous romantic relationships that are mediated and governed to a large degree by social media.” He then reflected on the difficulty of talking to his peers:
There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see why. Often I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self-identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it.
All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar.
So what can we do? We can’t turn back time to the pre-smartphone era, nor would we want to, given the many benefits of the technology. But we can take some reasonable steps to help teens get more of what they need.
One important step is to give kids a long period each day when they are not distracted by their devices: the school day. Phones may be useful for getting to and from school, but they should be locked up during the school day so students can practice the lost art of paying full attention to the people around them — including their teachers.
A second important step is to delay entry into social media, ideally keeping it entirely out of elementary and middle schools. At present, many 10- and 11-year-olds simply lie about their age to open accounts, and once that happens, other kids don’t want to be excluded, so they feel pressured to do the same.
The platforms should — at a minimum — be held legally responsible for enforcing their stated minimum age of 13. Since social media platforms have failed to do so using post-hoc detection methods, they should be required to implement age and identity verification for all new accounts, as many other industries have done. Verified users could still post under pseudonyms, and the verification could be done by reliable third parties rather than by the platforms themselves.
Even before Covid-19, teens were finding themselves increasingly lonely in school. The rapid transition to smartphone-mediated social lives around 2012 is, as we have shown, the prime suspect. Now, after nearly 18 months of social distancing, contagion fears, anxious parenting, remote schooling and increased reliance on devices, will students spontaneously put away their phones and switch back to old-fashioned in-person socializing, at least for the hours that they are together in school? We have a historic opportunity to help them do so.
Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Jean M. Twenge (@jean_twenge), a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”
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