Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Millennials: Most Stressed Americans

Stress levels for Americans have taken a decidedly downward turn across the USA — except for young adults, whose stress is higher than the national norm, says a newly released survey.

Those ages 18-33 — the Millennial generation — are plenty stressed, and it's not letting up: 39% say their stress has increased in the past year; 52% say stress has kept them awake at night in the past month. And more than any other age group, they report being told by a health care provider that they have either depression or an anxiety disorder.

The online survey of 2,020 U.S. adults 18 and older, conducted in August by Harris Interactive for the American Psychological Association, has been taking the stress pulse of Americans since 2007.

On a 10-point scale, where 1 means "little or no stress" and 10 means "a great deal of stress," the 2012 average is 4.9. But for Millennials, it's 5.4.

"Younger people do tend to be more stressed than older people do. It may be they are more willing to admit to it. It may be a phase of life. They just don't know where they're going in life," says Mike Hais of Arcadia, Calif., a market researcher and co-author of two books on that generation, including 2011's Millennial Momentum.

"Millennials are growing up at a tough time. They were sheltered in many ways, with a lot of high expectations for what they should achieve. Individual failure is difficult to accept when confronted with a sense you're an important person and expected to achieve. Even though, in most instances, it's not their fault — the economy collapsed just as many of them were getting out of college and coming of age — that does lead to a greater sense of stress," he says.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/06/stress-psychology-millennials-depression/1878295/

Mouse Study Links Teen Stress to Adult Mental Illness

New laboratory research on rodents suggests an elevated stress hormone in adolescence may be linked to severe mental illness in adulthood.

Johns Hopkins researchers noted that adolescence is a critical time for brain development. During this stage, a hormone abundance could potentially cause genetic changes which could result in severe mental illness among individuals.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, could have wide-reaching implications in both the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia, severe depression and other mental illnesses.

“We have discovered a mechanism for how environmental factors, such as stress hormones, can affect the brain’s physiology and bring about mental illness,” said study leader Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“We’ve shown in mice that stress in adolescence can affect the expression of a gene that codes for a key neurotransmitter related to mental function and psychiatric illness. While many genes are believed to be involved in the development of mental illness, my gut feeling is environmental factors are critically important to the process.”

“Genetic risk factors in these experiments were necessary, but not sufficient, to cause behaviors associated with mental illness in mice,” Sawa said. “Only the addition of the external stressor — in this case, excess cortisol related to social isolation — was enough to bring about dramatic behavior changes.”

The investigators not only found that the “mentally ill” mice had elevated levels of cortisol, known as the stress hormone because it is secreted at higher levels during the body’s fight-or-flight response, but that these mice had significantly lower levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in a specific region of the brain involved in higher brain function, such as emotional control and cognition. Changes in dopamine in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, depression and mood disorders have been suggested in clinical studies, but the mechanism for the clinical impact remains elusive.

Source: PsychCentral
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01/18/mouse-study-links-teen-stress-to-adult-mental-illness/50505.html

Stressed Out Young Girls at High Risk of Teen Anxiety, Depression

 A new Univerisity of Wisconsin-Madison study shows that young girls exposed to high stress levels have a better chance of suffering anxiety or depression as teenagers.

The UW-M research team recruited 57 young adults to take part in the study before they gave birth. That was back in 1990.

The original goal was to see how working women cope with the challenges of being mothers. The researchers looked at things like emotional and economic pressures facing those young mothers.

But as time went on, researcher Cory Burghy said his colleagues took a closer look at the kids, and how they handled the stresses of home life.

The mothers had stress exams, while the kids had their cortisol levels tested. The brains of those with high cortisol levels at age four-and-a-half took MRI exams when they were at 18 – and those results, plus interviews, turned up higher than normal levels of depression and anxiety in the girls.

But boys who grew up in similar households did not suffer the same conditions.

Source: WTAQ
http://wtaq.com/news/articles/2012/nov/12/study-stressed-out-young-girls-have-higher-risk-of-teen-anxiety-depression/

Poll: Kids' Lack of Activity is Top Health Concern

A recent national poll finds that the top health concern of adults across the United States for children is they are "not getting enough exercise."

The annual University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health comes up with a top 10 list of adults' biggest health concerns for kids in their communities.

For the first time, not enough exercise was rated by most adults, 39%, at the top of the list, according to a release from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Thirty-eight percent of those polled listed childhood obesity as the top concern. Smoking and tobacco use was cited by 34% as the biggest concern.

The remaining top concerns are:
 4. Drug abuse (33%)
 5. Bullying (29%)
 6. Stress (27%)
 7. Alcohol abuse (23%)
 8. Teen pregnancy (23%)
 9. Internet safety (22%)
10. Child abuse and neglect (20%)

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-08-22/child-health/57219420/1

Stressed Kids More Likely to Become Obese

Nine-year-old children who were chronically exposed to such stressors as poverty, crowded housing and family turmoil gain more weight and were significantly heavier by age 13 than they would have been otherwise, a new study has found. The researchers suggest the reason is that ongoing stress makes it tougher for children to control their behavior and emotions -- or self-regulate. That, in turn, can lead to obesity by their teen years.

The researchers measured the height and weight of 244 9-year-olds in rural New York state and calculated their various physical and psycho-social stressors -- for example, exposure to violence, living in a substandard house or having no access to such resources as books. They also measured the children's ability to delay gratification by offering them a choice between waiting for a large plate of candy versus having a medium plate immediately. The researchers measured the children's height and weight again four years later.

While the study doesn't prove that a child's inability to delay gratification causes her to gain weight, there's strong evidence to suggest that it does, according to Gary Evans, an environmental psychologist at Cornell University, and a co-author of the study . First, previous studies have shown that chronic stress is linked to weight gain in children and teenagers, and that children eat more sugary, fatty foods when stressed. Second, there's a plausible neurocognitive mechanism that may help better understand this behavior, Evans said. "There's some evidence that parts of the brain that are vulnerable and sensitive to stress, particularly early in life, are some of the same parts involved in this self-regulatory behavior."

The study appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Source: MedicalXpress
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-stressed-kids-obese.html

Young Girls May Lose Sleep Over Pressure to Be Thin

Some people may lose sleep over the pressure to be thin -- especially young white girls who are being pushed by female friends to lose weight or stay skinny, according to a new study.

"There is a significant amount of research in other areas regarding pressure on adolescent females to minimize body weight, but this pressure as it relates to sleep health is a less-explored topic and its consequences are mostly unknown," said the study's principal investigator, Katherine Marczyk, a doctoral student in clinical health psychology and behavioral medicine at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. "These results are important as this discovery could be one of the first steps in this research," she explained in a news release from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

In conducting the study, which was to be presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis, researchers asked 789 Texas middle-school students, all females and averaging 12 years of age, to describe how much pressure they felt to lose weight and be thin.

The girls also pinpointed the sources of this pressure, which included peers, family, friends and the media. Researchers then assessed the girls' quality of sleep to measure how this external pressure to be skinny affected how much sleep they got.

The pressure the girls felt to be thin from girlfriends as well as from the media significantly predicted sleep duration, accounting for 4.5 percent of the difference in how much sleep the girls got.

That discrepancy in sleep duration jumped to 6 percent among white girls (about 60 percent of the study's participants) who faced pressure to be skinny from their friends, the investigators found.

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/sleep/articles/2011/06/14/young-girls-may-lose-sleep-over-pressure-to-be-thin

Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.

The economy has only added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures on their parents but also because the students are worried about their own college debt and job prospects when they graduate.

For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/education/27colleges.html?_r=1

Students More Stressed Now Than During Great Depression

A new study has found that five times as many high school and college students are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues as youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era.

The findings, culled from responses to a popular psychological questionnaire used as far back as 1938, confirm what counselors on campuses nationwide have long suspected as more students struggle with the stresses of school and life in general.

"It's another piece of the puzzle — that yes, this does seem to be a problem, that there are more young people who report anxiety and depression," says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and the study's lead author. "The next question is: What do we do about it?"

Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external — from wealth to looks and status — has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.

Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by Twenge, researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review.

Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate — with six times as many scoring high in two areas:

• "hypomania," a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5% of students in 1938 to 31% in 2007)

• and depression (from 1% to 6%).

Twenge said the most current numbers may even be low given all the students taking antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, which help alleviate symptoms the survey asks about.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-01-12-students-depression-anxiety_N.htm

How Stressed Are Kids? More Than We Think

Worrying about school and about their family's finances are causing the most stress for kids, according to the American Psychological Association, which for the first time included young people ages 8 to 17 in its annual Stress in America survey, released Tuesday.

The survey of 1,206 young people and 1,568 adults, conducted over the summer by Harris Interactive, found that parents underestimated the level of stress children feel and the causes of that stress, often thinking that family relationships or activities cause more stress than children say they actually do.

Among findings:

•44% of young people say doing well in school was a source of stress.

•30% worry about their family having enough money.

•10% felt pressure over their extracurricular activities.

•8% say relationships with their parents were a source of stress.

In the survey, 63% of parents said they believed their stress levels had slight or no influence on their child's stress levels.

But psychologists say that doesn't reflect reality.

"If you ask the typical adult whether children are worried about the economy, you'd say, 'Of course not. They only have to worry about school,' " says pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg, an associate professor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He says young people "absolutely worry about the things they see us worry about."

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-11-04-APAkidstress04_ST_N.htm