8 Summary of Session 3

The main learning points of this session are:

• A helpful way of thinking about mental health is that it exists on a ‘spectrum’ representing anything from healthy functioning through ‘coping’ and ‘struggling’ to becoming ‘unwell’. People can move along this spectrum in both directions.

• Anxiety and depression are emotional responses to life’s challenges, in which a young person begins to find it increasingly difficult to cope and may be struggling. Listening and encouraging the young person to talk about their difficulties is an important first step in helping.

• Eating disorders and self-harm can become habitual ways of coping with emotional distress. Recognising these problems at an early stage can mean the young person receives professional help sooner. Parents, teachers and other caregivers can all play a role in breaking the cycle of harm.

• There is risk of suicide in young people who are struggling with their mental health, and the WAIT! Suicide prevention advice can help you to intervene if you are concerned about someone.

Finally, listen to Tanya Byron summing up some of the issues you have considered in this and the previous sessions.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 1: Interview with Professor Tanya Byron

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Transcript: Audio 1: Interview with Professor Tanya Byron

TANYA BYRON

Hello I’m professor Tanya Byron, I’m erm a clinical psychologist and I specialise in working with children and young people.

JOHN OATES

What sort of difficulties do children and young people come to you with?

TANYA BYRON

feeding, erm, even issues with toilet training. Behavioural issues to do with emotional self-regulation, tantrums, all the way up to erm older kids who start to show difficulties in schools. So, we are seeing learning difficulties as well as behavioural difficulties. And then as you move into adolescence, all the kind of issues associated with the emerging adults, if you like. And a lot of the transitional issues erm, that, erm, you know, by the age of 14, 50% of mental health problems

TANYA BYRON

will have shown themselves, so much more serious mental health issues will be kind of popping up then. So, depression, anxiety, and associated behaviours, self-harms, suicidal thoughts, suicidal attempts, those kinds of things.

JOHN OATES

So do you think there is something special about that period when these things start to emerge around that age?

TANYA BYRON

It is incredibly important that we really understand the changes that go on at a brain level, as well as at a hormonal level, and a social level

TANYA BYRON

or the adolescent. Adolescence is a critical time of development, and we really don’t pay it the right kind of attention. We see teenagers as rather annoying adults in waiting. But actually they are not children, they are not adults, they are adolescents. And that period of development has a very, very important and unique purpose. We see such extraordinary changes, particularly in the frontal cortex, changes that have

TANYA BYRON

Such an impact on erm moving forward in one’s life, to do with issues relating to individuation. Becoming one’s own person. And if there is an underlying inherited predisposition towards mental health difficulties, specific risk factors in life, or huge stresses that are impactful at that time of life, which is a stressful time of life. All of those put together, that is when we see a great upsurge in mental health difficulties first presenting.

JOHN OATES

What you have just been saying, you have really been talking about a lot that is going on inside the young person. But you have sort of alluded a little bit to external factors. Do you think it is best seen as something systemic that happens around this period?

TANYA BYRON

If we look at a systemic model, what we are talking about is … the best way I describe it when I am teaching is just a series of sort of concentric circles. So you have the individual in the middle, and then you draw a circle around and sort of really symbolise their sort of

TANYA BYRON

their sort of family that kind of envelopes them, and determines their development, their nurture and so on. And then around that you have their, sort of, educational system, and their peer groups, and then the wider society. So there are so many impacts on children as they emerge and transition into adolescence. Plus the hormonal changes, erm, what puberty brings on in terms of physical changes, early sexual development, sexual exploration, peer identity, which is an incredibly important

TANYA BYRON

part of adolescence, and of course around the sort of mid-adolescent time, huge amounts of academic pressure around public exams. So it is a time sort of fraught with opportunity and experience, but also with a lot of stress, and young people who are vulnerable, either because there is mental illness in the family that they may have inherited, or that they are experiencing, or other family issues. Or they may have neuro-developmental problems.

TANYA BYRON

Erm, these young people through this transitional time, will really, really struggle.

End transcript: Audio 1: Interview with Professor Tanya Byron

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