The Quarter-Life Crisis

In the course of my reading for my dissertation, I came across a brief remark about "the psychic break of late adolescence." It  had nothing to do with my topic so I didn't mark it, and can't remember where I read it, but it keeps reverberating in my brain.

I had one of those. In 1971 I had what was then called a "nervous breakdown" and was hospitalized for four days. After one intense session with my counselor there that lasted three hours, the dam broke, and within a couple of days I was fine and back to life.

Later on I found out that many of my acquaintances from high school and college also went through a major depression or nervous breakdown somewhere between the senior year of high school and the first year or two after college. There were also a couple of kids whose schizophrenia manifested at this time. For years I would see a boy who'd been a friend from junior high through college, busking at the Pike Place Market, clearly living as a homeless person. He didn't know me any more.

Then there were those who killed themselves. At least one a year, in my high school. These days, all too often the would-be suicide takes a gun to school and takes a few others with him.

But most of us got over it in time and didn't have a lifelong problem. And after reading that phrase, I started thinking: Is this really that common? And if it is, shouldn't parents know? Shouldn't schools know? Shouldn't kids know? Because depression (and its counterpart anxiety) does several things. Because you usually don't know why it's happening in the first place, you have no hope, no belief that things will get better. It isolates you from other people and makes you feel like a weirdo, like you're not doing things right, and that's particularly difficult for adolescents to handle, because they have not yet developed a strong sense of individuality and are very bound to "the group."

But what if you were told, say at the outset of high school, "it is a very common thing for people in their late teens and early 20s to lose their grip for a while. It happens to a lot of kids. What you need to know is that this is normal, not weird, and that it will not last. And that there are people who can help you move through it faster." Wouldn't that help?

I had that help, and I did get through it quickly. I've fallen into a depression a few times since then, but after that first time, I could believe that it would end. I even came to see these down times as fallow times where something was being worked out that I wasn't ready to deal with consciously yet. So I didn't despair when I felt depressed. I knew it was necessary and it would end. And afterwards I usually could figure out what it had all been about, and usually I made changes in my life.

But the first time, you don't know that. You have no prior experience to hold on to, that lets you say "oh yeah, been there done that, I know it will be okay again."

It seems to me that we need to talk about this a lot more. We need to treat the "quarter-life crisis," as it's called, almost like a rite of passage. Recognize it, validate it, and give kids some tools for managing it.

I suspect this is going to be my next book . . .