Everybody’s looking for a shrink instead of a sharpened pencil.” But it feels like people are disappearing into sadness. Gen-Z isn’t the first generation to struggle with anxiety they’re just the first one who isn’t hiding it.ĭowd goes on to quote a friend, the mother of a teenage daughter: “Back-to-school was always a time of excitement about where the future was headed - new notebooks, fresh supplies. In fact, telling young women to just “enjoy” their lives in the face of a mental health crisis is deeply unhelpful and irresponsible. Many mental health disorders first rear their heads during college-aged years, and grappling with anxiety or depression doesn’t make a young person any less promising or capable. Sizzling with adventure and promise can be overwhelming living away from home for the first time and figuring out who you are and who you want to be can be terrifying. This overly simplified take on anxiety in young adults made me cringe. “These young women seem to have everything, yet they are unable to fully enjoy a stretch in their life that should be sizzling with adventure and promise,” she writes. Which is why she has been feeling “sad,” when talking to friends with college-aged daughters, to learn about high rates of anxiety and campuses “awash in SSRIs.”
In her essay, “Anxiety in the Age Of Barbie,” Maureen Dowd cites a summer of girl power with Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé leading the charge. Given all of the progress we’ve made in the last decade, I was bothered by this opinion piece in The New York Times last week. Celebrities began to speak publicly about their anxiety and mental health, and a younger generation developed a vocabulary mine lacked, equipped with the understanding that it’s okay not to be okay. By the time I ultimately got sober at 28, citing lessened anxiety as a reason for not drinking felt socially acceptable. As the stigma around mental health faded, so did our collective shame.
Slowly, I began to return to equilibrium.Īs the cultural conversation around mental health shifted over the next few years, I grew increasingly comfortable discussing my anxiety. Still, while I initially worried about feeling unlike myself on medication – a groggy, zombie-like bobblehead – taking the pills felt like coming up for air after years underwater. No one talked about going to therapy, and I felt like a social recluse for needing help with my mental health. I hid my pill bottle from my boyfriend and roommates, stashing it in my sock drawer like contraband. I made up excuses for where I was walking when I bumped into friends on my way to therapy, offering squirrely responses to lunch invites. That first year, submerged in shame, I didn’t tell a soul I had started taking medication.
Eventually, after over a year of therapy and struggling through my days, I was prescribed an SSRI used to treat depression and anxiety disorder. In the light of day, my lingering worries made it hard to concentrate on more pertinent tasks like picking a major, studying for exams, or cleaning my dorm room. I lay awake at night worrying about the health of my loved ones, my career path, my weight. I was in college and worried often, mostly about hypothetical future scenarios that were largely out of my control. Years before I got sober, a therapist told me I had generalized anxiety disorder.
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