Only what if you're not feeling jolly? Or sociable? Though I think of myself as an ambivert, I've always felt that I lean more toward extrovert than introvert. Still, this last year-and-a-half spent largely at home has bothered me much less than I would have predicted it would. And, oddly enough, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to jump fully into the fray again.
Then again, my life has rolled along with comparatively minor adaptations. Sure, the switchover to first online learning, then hybrid learning, and now online (by choice this time) again has been exhausting. But I got to stay in touch with the people I love, hanging out at home with two who matter the most. I remained employed (even if my part-time job became a seven-days-a-week endeavor), and even got to leave the house -- albeit masked -- to conduct some of my teaching at my workplace in the same room as part of my class.
Many have not been so lucky, which is one reason the rates of depression and anxiety have soared. While some young people have taken to online learning, many others have struggled and teens and young adults are among those hardest hit by mental health issues.
When I worked as a school counselor, proactive, developmental lessons in topics like managing emotions and resolving conflict were a key part of my program. Arming kids with a feelings vocabulary was the first step in the direction of teaching them what to do with those feelings because, as humans, we feel all of them. If we ever wondered if that were the case, this last year has certainly given us a panorama of feelings.
While COVID-19 (or something like it) wasn't a total surprise to health researchers, there's only so much prior planning that can be done when the disaster you sort-of see coming remains undefined.
Is this so with mental health? Can we prevent depression?
A series in Medium ponders this same question, and it's a complicated one. The list of risk factors for depression could describe practically any one of us on any given day, and some of those risk factors (genes) are much harder to overcome than others (a really crummy day). Others are a part of life (loss of loved ones), but hit some of us harder and with greater frequency than others.
The article got me wondering how many adults have ever had what my students had: lessons in identifying and labeling feelings. "Depressed" has become a word that we throw around with tremendous frequency. It has, to an extent, become an amorphous blanket description -- a catchall term, if you will -- so that, when we're faced with upsetting life events, we quickly escalate to self-diagnosis. We equate temporary (albeit very real) emotions with a mental health diagnosis before we stop to ask ourselves two key questions:
- how do I feel?
- what do I need?
We've all had good reason to feel anxious, sad, discouraged, frightened, frustrated and, yes, even depressed over the past 15 months. And, if you're like me, you might have, in the midst of those questions, asked yourself if you should be concerned. If you were truly suffering from depression in the clinical sense. And, if those feelings persisted, I hope you talked to someone -- a physician, a psychologist, someone on a mental health hotline -- and determined your best course of action.
Depression has truly taken many people down during this pandemic and under no circumstances am I questioning diagnoses made by reputable health/mental health professionals. Nor do I mean to minimize the anguish that comes with anxiety and depression.
But if it's possible to prevent depression -- to keep ourselves from crossing that line into debilitating sadness and struggle -- it seems to me that the two questions above are, perhaps, a good way to start. When we get good at knowing ourselves and our personal ebb and flow of positive and negative emotions and identifying what we need, we can develop the skills we need to deal with the day-to-day, along with the confidence we need in order to know when it's all too much.
Reading the ideas in the Medium article above sparked my thinking for this post. In addition, it concluded with a very important disclaimer, which I'm copying here because sometimes, labeling feelings is not enough and what we need is someone trained to help us come through our feelings to the other side.
If you or a loved one is depressed, it’s vital to talk about it. Because depression increases the risk of suicide, consider calling the confidential National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) for English, 1-888-628-9454 for Spanish.
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