Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Several years ago, I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions. Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression — almost before telling me their names…

I’ve been listening to girls every day for years, and I’ve learned a few things that can help parents, therapists and anyone else who struggles to communicate with young women as they describe some form of distress.

It starts with accepting that diagnosis words may function differently for these young women from the way they do for others. They are not necessarily claims to cold, scientific truths, yoked to specific evidence-based treatments. Instead, research increasingly reveals, these words are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to situate one’s very personal pain. We should try to hear them that way: We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally…

Several young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort — which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings. Another girl said she used her various self-diagnoses as a container for whatever felt like “too much” about her, allowing her to fulfill what she thought was the teenage female’s highest calling: to be chill.

In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance…

To be clear, I’d still rather live in a world where everyone talks about trauma too much than one where you’d get shoved in a locker for being different. Ideally, we should create an environment in which girls can stop blaming their own brains for every problem and where they don’t feel they have to be sick to be heard. Until they have access to a more nuanced lexicon of human troubles, however, we need to listen differently.

Small acts of translation can help. Someone who says she has A.D.H.D. may or may not fit the clinical definition, but she’s probably telling you she feels scattered, overwhelmed or afraid she’s a mess. If someone says she has anxiety, you can be pretty sure she’s nervous, uneasy or unsure of herself. If the word “depressed” freaks you out, consider instead why the person using it feels hopeless, lonely or in despair.

If you’re sick of hearing every classmate, roommate or ex described as “toxic,” look past the cliché and consider the harm it’s meant to describe. Whatever works, gently offer that less literal meaning back to her — not to challenge her words but to understand them. Not to see if she really has a particular diagnosis but to see what’s going on beneath it.

This kind of translation is a quiet process but changes the way you show up, the energy you bring. With teenagers, that’s always half the battle. Being too reactive makes it about you and your fears; being too quick to reassure can make you seem you don’t understand the seriousness of her concerns. Searching beneath the buzzwords for what she’s really telling you avoids both pitfalls.’ (from the New York Times)

I thought this was a good follow-on from last Monday’s post about men.