Hiding In Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness Documentary – A Review Part II

Kids and adolescents deal with mental health challenges differently. Kids want to isolate, and not tell anyone. Because in their little brains, things can be confusing and if there’s no sufficient vocabulary, expressing themselves can be frustrating. So they tend to keep secrets and one child did just that and it would upset him that he was keeping things from his parents.

Adolescents are trying to understand the family they belong to and also what their place in the world is. So a poor teen tries to fit into her friend’s group by lying about things and act as if things are better than normal for her in her life. One teen talks about her life was good as a teen, but she had a persistent insecurity about the way she looked.

There’s a boy who likes to dress in feminine clothes, and once when he goes to school with pink hair, his car is vandalized and the words “queer” is spray painted on his back windshield.

“I wanted to know who I was, but who do I ask?”

It was sad to hear that one teen thought that the world was full of toxicity and people who didn’t take others’ feelings into account. One teen says, “The older generation has to make attempts to know our world, its much different than theirs. The pandemic has increased the levels of depression and anxiety. What worked for them won’t work for us. Its like running old software on new hardware. It just doesn’t work that way.”

There are new pressures of being a teen in this world. Everyone’s scared to be open about their struggles especially on social media. If they open up, these teens are “looked down upon.” Social media is “another form of isolation.” I’m online but I’m not with anyone in the real world at that time. Twitter raised me since I was 13 and now I’m 23.

When you’re staring at Snapchat or Instagram and see a bunch of friends hanging out a party, you ask yourself, “What did I do wrong that I didn’t get the invite?” Social media has become a place to make yourself fit into everyone else’s definition of cool. Its a competition to be the best at any cost. “Every girl is OK being average, but its like everyone else is not OK with that idea.”

When things are said to you on social media, it hits “different, it hits hard.” When friends were tagging a teen and calling her names, she messaged them to say, “It hurts me.” But the name calling didn’t stop.

That’s when thoughts like, “What if I am not here, these problems would go away.” On Reddit, they show us a quote that says, “It’s like I died at 15, and my body kept on living.”

One of the teens starts watching videos on depression and suicidal ideation on YouTube to find out that she was not alone. A 23 year old says that without social media, I wouldn’t be talking to anyone, so there’s no choice but to be on it.

When a teen’s best friend kills himself, he says, “I don’t know what to do from there.”

When a mom became a drug addict, one girl goes to live with her father. But she starts acting out and becomes someone “who is miserable to live with.” When a teen girl is 12, her father’s father commits suicide. And the father who’s already an alcoholic has a relapse. And “if my father can do this, so can I” and she takes to prescription pill abuse and drinking.

A girl’s dad dies the day after Christmas and a girl finds it difficult to cope. Another dad had such anger issues, and seemingly hit them for no reason, that the kids would hide under the bed for hours. Studies show that children who are victims of domestic abuse have the same level of trauma as they themselves being victims of abuse.

Part III

To be continued HERE.

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