Update on Work With Teens
I am currently doing some work with teens in the Orange County CA area. While drug abuse prevention remains my primary message, school assemblies are few and far between since the pandemic. I have turned some of my attention to other areas of concern for teens in 2023. The first is suicide prevention, and the second is internet safety.
Suicide Prevention
In 2020, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among those ages 10-24 and 25-34. Teen suicides went down during the lockdown, but then rose very quickly when in-person schooling restarted. This research was recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which stated: “that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase in teen suicides.” This trend can be reversed by knowing the warning signs and getting mental health treatment quickly when a teenager is having suicidal thoughts. I have been working to get the word out on this and help families solve this problem for most of 2022 and 2023. In October, I did a co-speaking event on this topic with Dr. Sayeh Beheshti at Fusion Academy in Anaheim, CA. Currently, I speak with families of suicidal teens almost every day and I can tell you the problem seems to be widespread and is not going away any time soon.
Internet Safety
My work in this area is just beginning and is fairly simple at the moment, but I look forward to learning more about it. In a previous post, I talked a bit about how today’s teenagers are savvier on the internet than millennials or any other previous generation. They are not suffering from depression caused by comparing themselves to someone’s Instagram. They are “internet natives” as they grew up with the internet from a very young age. The problems they face are as follows-
– Socializing on the internet is normal and common, exposing teens to many people who are lying about their identity or misrepresenting who they are in some way.
– Cyberbullying is widespread and common and is normally perpetrated by other kids from the same school. The same teenage feuds that we had in the 70s, 80s, and 90s now explode into huge cyber-bullying incidents.
– Some teens don’t socialize in the real world at all, preferring to interact with people they’ve met online.
Stay tuned for more updates as I explore these issues further.
