Mental Health and the Young Person's Pressure Cooker.

At twenty-five years old, I, like the majority of my peers, find my i-phone to be a natural extension of my limbs. My whole life is channelled through this one portal, my alarm clock, my banking, Facebook and Twitter, my camera and hundreds of pictures, Amazon, my music collection, news source, calorie counter. An identity has been gathered and constructed and I hold it constantly in the palm of my hand to reaffirm the person I am, the cold sweat of dread when the damn thing goes missing a feeling we are all familiar with. The constant noise that we surround ourselves with becomes necessary and normal; I find myself suspicious of people that don't have Facebook (what are they hiding?) and people that don't have i-phones are just plain inconvenient (what do you mean you don't have i message or whatsapp? I have to pay to text you?)

Youngminds charity published the findings of their mental health survey recently, with the pressures of our  relentless and 'toxic culture' on young people hitting the headlines. Fear of failure, worrying about job prospects and negative self image were some of the many topics confronted in the poll of 2,000 young people between the age of 11-25. YoungMinds campaigns director Lucie Russell, said: "Every day we hear about the unprecedented toxic climate children and young people face in a 24/7 online culture where they can never switch off."

Technology and social media is an intrinsic part of our lives, the identity created on these platforms all adding to the addictive pressure cooker that we find ourselves in. What Youngminds is doing in their Youngminds VS campaign is bringing to our attention the critical picture; more and more young people are suffering from anxiety, depression and other issues than ever before, manipulated by media and influenced by culture, so it becomes important to better equip ourselves when it comes to talking about mental health and our lifestyles.

There are enormous pressures faced as a young person beginning to gather their lives into their  own hands; pressure to succeed, to get good marks, to 'go travelling' (a vague and unspecific destination that everyone seems to have visited.) There is a need to be accepted, be the right shape, to get a good job relating to your good degree, squeeze the value out of your education, save for a house deposit, to be in a relationship. The path is well-tread before us, the message clear; work out who you are, but make sure who you are looks good, earns good, and can get on the property ladder.

It is no surprise then that anxiety and depression is rising in this constant and 'toxic' environment. Stress and anxiety has you believing that you are holding the world up and one wrong move will have everything crashing down, depression knocking any light left out of you. Panic attacks and the fear of them can lock you tight in a never ending cycle of obsessive compulsive behaviour that then makes each minute of a normal day like a full-scale battleground. Facebook and Instagram meanwhile, is telling you that everyone else is having a good time, looking good, loving their graduate jobs, travelling to cool and trendy places, often alienating users when it's ethos is to connect people. Social media despite it's constant presence can often hold a lonely and hollow portrait of a person.

It is education that liberates a young person from the pressure cooker, giving an individual the tools to craft a life and a living from what they love to do, and a good education should inspire someone to do just that. A school should not be an exam factory, but a fertile land where we breed confidence in young minds; confidence to develop individual strengths and value them, measuring success by something other than the wage packet it returns to you. But that is not how the song sings, and an honest look at how we are teaching young people before we send them out into the world would answer a lot of questions when it comes the state of the mental health of 11-25 year olds.

It's not failure to suffer in this way- it's inevitable;  it's a difficult task, trying to find out who you are and what you want, at the same time as trying to fit in to what the society and your peers and your family expect you to be.

"The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life."      

Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life  (1903)

We enter into a world already created, and in our attempts to try and craft an identity, find ourselves against a backdrop that already exists. The world is already moving when we enter into it, it has rhythm and timings, society has seats ready for you to sit at, and the discomfort felt is this friction; you're trying to be yourself, but need the world and society to tell you who that is.

If you were born on to a blank canvas, that's what you would be, a creature with no language, a creature who didn't know whether you liked Chinese takeaway or not, whether 'How I met your Mother' was funny or not. You know what you like and what you dislike because it is pressed against you constantly. Your language, your mannerisms, your tastes and preferences, your ideas about right and wrong, about what you think you want, what you know- all this comes from somewhere external to you.

So if you take away the i-phone, who, actually, are you?

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