Social pressures devastate teens

“I didn’t really plan it,” remembers “Lily,” an anonymous Waseca County teenager who attempted suicide in 2019. “I just…did it.”

“It,” in Lily’s case, was to acquire the contents of a wide array of pill bottles. “I swallowed them and then I just sat there for, I don’t know how long. A half hour or an hour.

“Then I decided I should go tell someone.”

Except that she couldn’t actually bring herself to say the words. Instead, as tears streamed down her face, she responded to her mother’s questions about what was wrong by pointing to the bathroom and letting the empty bottles speak for themselves.

Lily was far from alone in her attempt to commit suicide. According to Erin McHenry of the Minnesota Department of Health, somewhere around 5,000 Minnesota teens are hospitalized every year for self-inflicted injuries. According to an annual survey distributed to Minnesota students in grades 8, 9 and 11, nearly 4% of our state’s teenagers report having attempted suicide within the past year.

Another organization, the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI), has found that nearly 20% of American high school students have seriously considered suicide and about 9% have made a serious attempt. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 111 youth ages 10 to 24 committed suicide in our state in 2019, the most recent year for which published statistics are available. The rate of suicide among young people has been rising for decades.

Fortunately, interventions occur in a strong percentage of suicide attempts, as happened that day for Lily when her family saw the empty pill bottles. What followed was an immediate flurry of activity as her family rushed her to an area hospital, working hard the whole time to keep her awake. “I puked on the way,” she remembers. “It hurt so badly I thought I was going to die.” 

Once at the hospital she was given “a really awful tasting” emetic meant to help her throw up the contents of her stomach. “I had a sore throat for days,” she remembers. She, however, was fairly ”out of it” as doctors and nurses worked with her. She remembers fairly little, but does recall imagining she saw cartoon-like monsters coming down from the ceiling. She also may have flirted rather shamelessly with male members of the medical staff.

“Here everyone was trying to save my life,” she observes, “and I barely even knew what was going on.”

Lily spent one day in an intensive care unit, another in a hospital room, and then she was transferred to an inpatient mental health facility.

“That’s where the most important treatment came,” she says. Schedules and programs at the mental health center gave her no choice but to open up and talk about herself, something Lily had previously found a very hard time doing.

At the time of her suicide attempt, she had been living in Waseca County only about 6 months. During much of her time growing up, her family had moved fairly frequently. “Every time we moved, I think I withdrew into myself a little more,” she says. “By 2019, when I was a junior, you could barely get a peep out of me.” She had only a few friends and never spoke her deepest feelings to them out loud.

Also contributing to her shyness was a history of having been bullied. “I would say something and someone would shut me down,” she remembers. “So finally I just made it my habit not to say anything.”

Increasing her feelings of being an outsider was the on-line behavior of certain anonymous individuals. She remembers posting some statements she thought were clever or uplifting on one site and receiving responses that she was “stupid” and “should go kill” herself. 

“I saved a screenshot of it on my phone for a long time,” she says. “I just couldn’t believe the kinds of things people would say.”

At other times, communicating among a small group of friends, Lily remembers sharing her feelings and impressions online. “Sometimes they were really dark, depressing things and I’m not sure anyone knew how to respond.” She suspects that, not knowing what else to do, her friends would “scroll right by” many such statements.

“I’m not sure I would have accepted help then, anyway,” she says. “They might have asked ‘Are you okay?’ and I’m not sure I would have known how to answer.”

Looking back on it, Lily says that rather than texting or posting her feelings, she should have found someone she was ready to speak with face to face, and then engaged in a genuine conversation.

But that’s not how teens do things these days, and it especially wasn’t how it was during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“More of their social interaction is online than it is in person,” she says of typical teenagers. “It’s really not healthy.” Along with the lack of face-to-face communication  is the type of material teens expose themselves to. Lily mentions the fairly recent case of a teen who used a live feed during a suicide attempt.

“No one should see some of the things that get posted online,” she says. “Yes, you get to see puppies and kittens, but you also see a lot of really bad stuff. You’ll be scrolling along through your feed, and all of a sudden there it will be.

“Of course you’re not looking for it, but once it starts it’s like a bus crash. You can’t look away.” Lily also speculates that the negative impact social media has on teens is magnified by the speed and frequency at which the bad news is delivered.

“There it comes, one thing after another. There’s so much of it and it doesn’t stop. How can it not give you a negative outlook on things?” she asks.

Even today, when she has the perception she uses it much less than before, Lily’s phone indicates she spends an average of 6 hours a day sending text messages, checking on-line sites, and referring to social media. Survey results published by various agencies online claim that American young people spend between 7 and 9 hours a day on social media.

“It worries me,” she says, “when I think about my younger siblings who still follow some of those sites.”

Lily’s recollection is that, once her first thoughts of committing suicide crossed her mind, they never really went away. In fact, they still surface occasionally. But thanks to the therapy she has received and the habits of self reflection she has learned, she has a system for containing them.

“I picture harmful ideas as being in a bubble,” she explains. “And I just sort of watch them float by.

While the idea might cross my mind, genuinely considering suicide now would be like a slap in the face to everything I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown.”

In addition to conversations with therapists and a course which required her to share her feelings with family members, Lily says she’s a much different person today than she was in 2019. “I hated having to do those things,” she admits, “but I realized as I was doing them that they were exactly what I needed.”

She also feels she is more attentive to the kinds of statements fellow teens and folks in their early twenties are sharing. “If I see something that I believe is dangerous,” she comments, “I say something.” And not just on-line, but through friends and family. “I don’t care if someone might find it irritating,” she says. “I reach out.”

Another concern Lily has is for any young people who say they need help, but who are told by others–including parents–that professional help is unnecessary.

“We’ve got to change that stigma,” she says. “If someone says they need help, they need it.” Professional therapists, she says, have the knowledge and tools to recognize difficulties and initiate change. The conversations she had with her therapists made a genuine difference in her outlook, and provided tools that she uses all the time to evaluate her perspective.

She can see now that “They’re there to help,” she says. “Not judge you or irritate you on purpose.”