TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/1008108.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 211 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 47

COVER STORIES

Struggling for Sanity


Mental and emotional distress are taking an alarming toll of
the young

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- Reported by Kathleen Brady/New York,
Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago and James Willwerth/Los Angeles


    The dozen telephone lines at the cramped office of
Talkline/Kids Line in Elk Grove Village, Ill., ring softly every
few minutes. Some of the youthful callers seem at first to be
vulgar pranksters, out to make mischief with inane jokes and
naughty language. But soon the voices on the line -- by turns
wistful, angry, sad, desperate -- start to spill a stream of
distress. Some divulge their struggles with alcohol or crack and
their worries about school and sex. Others tell of their
feelings of boredom and loneliness. Some talk of suicide. What
connects them all, says Nancy Helmick, director of the two hot
lines, is a sense of "disconnectedness."

    Such calls attest to the intense psychological and emotional
turmoil many American children are experiencing. It is a problem
that was not even recognized until just a decade ago. Says Dr.
Lewis Judd, director of the National Institute of Mental Health:
"There had been a myth that childhood is a happy time and kids
are happy go lucky, but no age range is immune from experiencing
mental disorders." A report prepared last year by the Institute
of Medicine estimates that as many as 7.5 million children --
12% of those below the age of 18 -- suffer from some form of
psychological illness. A federal survey shows that after
remaining constant for 10 years, hospitalizations of youngsters
with psychiatric disorders jumped from 81,500 to about 112,000
between 1980 and 1986. Suicides among those ages 15 to 19 have
almost tripled since 1960, to 1,901 deaths in 1987. Moreover,
the age at which children are exhibiting mental problems is
dropping: studies suggest that as many as 30% of infants 18
months old and younger are having difficulties ranging from
emotional withdrawal to anxiety attacks.

    What is causing so much mental anguish? The sad truth is
that a growing number of American youngsters have home lives
that are hostile to healthy emotional growth. Psyches are
extremely fragile and must be nourished from birth. Everyone
starts out life with a basic anxiety about survival. An
attentive parent contains that stress by making the youngster
feel secure and loved.

    Neglect and indifference at such a crucial stage can have
devastating consequences. Consider the case of Sid. (Names of
the children in this story have been changed.) When he was three
months old, his parents left him with the maid while they took
a five-week trip. Upon their return, his mother noticed that Sid
was withdrawn, but she did not do anything about it. When Sid
was nine months old, his mother left him again for four weeks
while she visited a weight-loss clinic. By age three, Sid had
still not started talking. He was wrongly labeled feebleminded
and borderline autistic before he received appropriate
treatment.

    As children mature within the shelter of the family, they
develop what psychologists call a sense of self. They acquire
sensitivities and skills that lead them to believe they can cope
independently. "People develop through a chain," observes Dr.
Carol West, a child psychotherapist in Beverly Hills. "There has
to be stability, a consistent idea of who you are."

    The instability that is becoming the hallmark of today's
families breeds in children insecurity rather than pride, doubts
instead of confidence. Many youngsters feel guilty about broken
marriages, torn between parents and households, and worried
about family finances. Remarriage can intensify the strains.
Children may feel abandoned and excluded as they plunge into
rivalries with stepparents and stepsiblings or are forced to
adjust to new homes and new schools. Children from troubled
homes used to be able to find a psychological anchor in societal
institutions. But no longer. The churches, schools and
neighborhoods that provided emotional stability by transmitting
shared traditions and values have collapsed along with the
family.

    Such disarray hurts children from all classes; wealth may
in fact make it harder for some children to cope. Says Hal Klor,
a guidance counselor at Chicago's Lincoln Park High School: "The
kids born into a project, they handle it. But the middle-class
kids. All of a sudden -- a divorce, loss of job, status. Boom.
Depression."

    Jennifer shuttled by car service across New York City's
Central Park between her divorced parents' apartments and
traveled by chartered bus to a prep school where kids rated one
another according to their family cars. "In the eighth grade I
had panic attacks," says Jennifer, now 18. "That's when your
stomach goes up and you can't leave the bathroom and you get
sweaty and you get headaches and the world closes in on you."
Her world eventually narrowed so far that for several weeks she
could not set foot outside her home.

    The children who suffer the severest problems are those who
are physically or sexually abused. Many lose all self-esteem and
trust. Michele, 15, who is a manic-depressive and an alcoholic,
is the child of an alcoholic father who left when she was two
and a mother who took out her rage by beating Michele's younger
sister. When Michele was 12, her mother remarried. Michele's new
stepbrother promptly began molesting her. "So I molested my
younger brother," confesses Michele. "I also hit him a lot. He
was four. I was lost; I didn't know how to deal with things."

    At the same time, family and society are expecting more from
kids than ever before. Parental pressure to make good grades,
get into college and qualify for the team can be daunting.
Moreover, kids are increasingly functioning as junior adults in
many homes, taking on the responsibility of caring for younger
siblings or ailing grandparents. And youngsters' own desires --
to be accepted and popular with their peers, especially -- only
add to the strain.

    Children express the panic and anxiety they feel in myriad
ways: in massive weight gains or losses, in nightmares and
disturbed sleep, in fatigue or listlessness, in poor grades or
truancy, in continual arguing or fighting, in drinking or drug
abuse, in reckless driving or sexual promiscuity, in stealing
and mugging. A fairly typical history among disturbed kids, says
Dr. L. David Zinn, co-director of Northwestern Memorial
Hospital's Adolescent Program, includes difficulty in school at
age eight or nine, withdrawal from friends and family and
persistent misbehavior at 10 or 11 and skipping school by 15.
But the most serious indication of despair -- and the most
devastating -- is suicide attempts. According to a report
issued in June by a commission formed by the American Medical
Association and the National Association of State Boards of
Education, about 10% of teenage boys and 18% of girls try to
kill themselves at least once.

    Despite the urgency of the problems, only 1 in 5 children
who need therapy receives it; poor and minority youngsters get
the least care. Treatment is expensive, and even those with
money and insurance find it hard to afford. But another reason
is that too often the signals of distress are missed or put down
to normal mischief.

    Treatment relies on therapeutic drugs, reward and
punishment, and especially counseling -- not just of the
youngster but of the entire family. The goal is to instill in
the children a feeling of self-worth and to teach them
discipline and responsibility. Parents, meanwhile, are taught
how to provide emotional support, assert authority and set
limits.

    One of the most ambitious efforts to reconstruct family life
is at Logos School, a private academy outside St. Louis that was
founded two decades ago for troubled teens. Strict rules
governing both school and extracurricular life are laid out for
parents in a 158-page manual. Families are required to have
dinner together every night, and parents are expected to keep
their children out of establishments or events, say local
hangouts or rock concerts, where drugs are known to be sold.
Parents must also impose punishments when curfews and other
rules are broken. Says Lynn, whose daughter Sara enrolled at
Logos: "My first reaction when I read the parents' manual was
that there wasn't a thing there that I didn't firmly believe in,
but I'd been too afraid to do it on my own. It sounds like such
a cop-out, but we wanted Sara to be happy."

    As necessary and beneficial as treatment may be, it makes
better sense to prevent emotional turmoil among youngsters by
improving the environment they live in. Most important, parents
must spend more time with sons and daughters and give them the
attention and love they need. To do less will guarantee that
ever more children will be struggling for sanity.


_________________________________________________________________
STRUGGLING FOR SANITY

    Teen Terror

    Lucky's parents divorced bitterly when he was eight, and he
became the caretaker of both his mother and his younger brother.
To deal with his unhappiness, Lucky turned first to food and
ballooned to 160 lbs. in the fifth and sixth grades. At 13, he
substituted drugs. Eventually, he turned to theft and street
violence. "I've broken all my knuckles," says the youth, now 16.
"I get into blank rages where I don't even remember what
happened."

    Slow Suicide

    Scott felt like a misfit at age 11, when his mother's
remarriage took him from a lower-middle-class area to a wealthy
suburb. Miserable, he began to drink and take drugs, buying $5
hits of the coolant Freon from a warehouse worker in the morning
and then loading up on marijuana at his school during lunchtime.
"It was like I was actually killing myself indirectly," says
Scott, 18, who with treatment has been sober for three years.

    Blacking Out

    Sara's life fell apart when she started high school last
year. A straight-A student in grade school, she began skipping
classes, dating a physically abusive older student and wearing
only black. By winter, she was trying to kill herself. Sara, who
says she felt rejected by her parents, calmly recites her
attempts: "Four or five times I took pills. Once I almost slit
my wrists, and I tried to hang myself once." With therapy, Sara,
at 15, sees a future. One sign: she is wearing colors again.