From ‘If I Ever Get Out of Here, ’ we witnessed how Louis’s uncle Albert struggled with PTSD and how that influenced his behaviors. In ‘Charlotte Temple,’ we learned how severe trauma and emotional abuse could cause a mental and physical breakdown to the point of death. ‘The Lowell Offering’ showed a young woman in adolescence also going through some pretty significant mental health challenges like grief, loneliness, and even depression. However, in many of these books, the novel never discussed it in depth when the story brought up mental health issues. Often, readers had to critically assess or infer that mental health was the issue at hand. For example, at no point in Ganswroth’s ‘If I Ever Get Out of Here’ was the phrase “PTSD” mentioned. Instead, we were told that Albert was on disability, was drafted and shipped to the Vietnam War, reacted to the word “Vietnam,” had “bird-shot brain,” and was generally aloof and not the smoothest talker in front of people. This type of allusion to mental health issues rather than confronting them outright was fascinating throughout the course. Yet it left an unanswered question: how would adolescence be different for a person who perhaps struggles with mental health but has resources to help those struggles? Suppose mental illness wasn’t a glossed-over topic in the adolescent’s life, and they had an openness, education, and acceptance from family members and peers about it. How different would their adolescent phase of life be?
We know from personal experience, and even from having an entire college semester-long class about it, that adolescence is a wildly fascinating, unnerving, frightening, and fast-changing period in a person’s life. It is second to neonatal development for how fast a living human grows and develops. With taking on slightly more adult challenges, adolescents often find themselves with new mental and personal issues to sort through as well. From hormone imbalances to overwhelmingness after taking on novel stressors, mental illness is a prevalent thing that many teenagers experience. As we saw in a handful of novels, it is also often a controversial topic that is much too often swept under the rug.
To come to realize that one has a mental illness, or for a parent or other grown-up to recognize it in a young child, is a beautiful thing. It validates erratic behavior and is the first step to working through those issues. Many adolescents, however, do not have that luxury, especially in older times before the age of Montessori rearing and general mental health awareness. There is the phrase, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” While that statement has a few holes in its validity, I believe it encompasses the old-school idea of mental health relatively well: it is not an illness; the adolescent must downplay it, and even still, it is what turns a boy into a man (or girl into a woman, I assume old-schoolers would say).
Through a psychological and social lens, this old-school ideology made me think about the true implications of mental health on adolescents. It is profoundly evident that trauma causes a person to grow up quicker and speed up the adolescent phase, but is subsiding mental illness and pushing it down further within and ignoring it another sign of growth? Perhaps the emotional action of pushing down one’s feelings is a trauma in and of itself, which would explain why the girls from ‘The Lowell Offering’ seemed so incredibly mature throughout their time away from home, working long, difficult hours.
On the opposite spectrum, what if a child with mental illness, be it anxiety, ADHD, ADD, depression, actually had the support of his family and peers? Though the times in which these novels were written in made this scenario unlikely, it would have been interesting to read about how support rather than suppression made adolescence different. Would the child be behind in adolescence because maybe they were allowed to revel in their youth for a bit longer? Or would the stability and nurture from family have a positive impact on growth and development? If so, how significant would the effect be?
Most of all, this class and its selection of books that we read and discussed helped reexamine adolescence through many lenses. From the LGBTQ+ lens, to the historical, and racially-driven lens, we examined the significance of this awkward phase of life. Mental health is a topic that is very near to me, and so I would have loved to have learned how mental health illness awareness played a role in facilitating or slowing down adolescent changes.
Works Cited:
Eisler, Benita. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women ; (1840 – 1845). Norton, 1998.
Gansworth, Eric. If I Ever Get Out of Here. First ed., Scholastic Inc., 2013.
Rowson, Susana. Charlotte Temple A Tale of Truth. Evert Duyckinck, 1814.
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 