The kids are not alright. At least according to Inside Out 2, which portrays its everyman character, Riley: a teenage girl going through puberty, experiencing anxiety for the first time. Breaking records and earning $1,673,622,699 in its worldwide theatrical run, Inside Out 2 made waves last summer, but it doesn’t address the bigger questions. Who and how should we be noticing anxious behaviors in adolescents? If anxiety is a normal emotion, when is the threshold for seeking diagnosis and intervention?
Approximately 31.9% of adolescents and 19.1% of adults have anxiety disorders. While anxiety may present differently from person to person, there’s been an increase in how much literature and representation has been given to the topic. With this extensive media representation and academic literature on the subject, one would think that addressing and recognizing chronic anxiety would be simple. The problem is that the place where children spend the most time per week is thoroughly undereducated and underprepared to help students cope with any form of anxiety, especially chronic or severe anxiety. The American school system is where children spend most of their formative years, and the administrators and teachers who see these kids every day are part of their earliest bonds and forms of community outside the family unit. With this amount of interaction, sometimes teachers and friends know more about students than their own families, so why do so many children with anxiety go unnoticed or untreated? Well, the simple fact is that the school system’s “front line” of mental health awareness is undereducated for the title and overworked.
That’s right, I’m talking about school counselors. There’s this misconception in the media that school counselors have nothing to do all day but dole out career advice and listen to students’ worries. The truth is the opposite, the counselors are more worried about attendance, scheduling, and getting kids to pass their classes to graduate, and they rarely go out of their way to inquire about students’ mental well-being. While this is not entirely their fault; there are too few counselors for the amount of students they are supposed to handle, they are also influenced by the media representation of anxiety and uneducated of its many forms, to target the right pool of students likely to need their help. The system is built to flag the students who attend school irregularly or get into physical altercations on the property. While these situations do cause valid concern for these specific groups of students, highly anxious and undiagnosed students are also very likely to be overachievers and model students.
The persistent belief that perfectionism is the standard and that one has to outperform others, because that is the only way people will like them are common markers of people-pleasing and anxiety-riddled students who will become adults who carry on those habits. The pressure of the American school system for students to maintain high GPAs, extracurriculars, and social life only exacerbates this issue. When students are struggling with anxiety but still managing all A’s and extracurriculars go by unnoticed, we are encouraging them to mask their mental illness. No one wants to believe that the model student is struggling or that someone can have diagnosed anxiety and no one would spot it because they can speak in front of crowds and maintain good grades. The truth is that these students are the exact ones the system overlooks. We need to educate those who are supposed to be the first ones to reach out to check on students’ wellness, provide more resources for student’s mental well-being, and change the system so that it understands the valedictorian is just as if not more likely to have chronic anxiety than the one who gets into a school fight.
There is also still the question of how much anxiety is too much. While Riley, the movie’s main character, is never diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, or even panic attacks, the film introduces the character with the idea that everyone has some amount of anxiety–it’s baked into us as an intrinsic emotion. While that may be true to some extent, 31.1% of adults will experience an anxiety disorder in their life, it doesn’t specify where the line exists between a normal amount of anxiety and how much anxiety should be concerning enough for someone to seek help. Depicting anxiety as a completely normal emotion is a great step in the right direction for awareness of how to cope with or support someone with anxiety, but calling anxiety “normal” then makes it difficult to understand at what point your condition may be “abnormal”. If we are to understand Riley as an “everyman”, a representation of society as a whole, then are we supposed to understand that it’s normal to have a panic attack? If panic attacks are normal, why would someone seek help after having one?
The children and adolescents that this movie is aimed at, may not understand that while anxiety is a normal emotion, too much of it may be a cause of concern and require medical assistance. Parents themselves may start questioning if what their child exhibits is a normal pubescent experience or how to tell if something is serious enough to get medical help. The film never shows an epilogue if Riley ends up telling her parents what just happened, or if she receives help for her panic attacks, which makes it seem like after that one moment of intense anxiety, the emotion has now been contained and everything is well. That is rarely the case, anxiety tends to be a neverending undercurrent in the brain of people with chronic anxiety disorders. So even if the school system is not prepared for the current wave of adolescent anxiety, parents aren’t either. With an entire industry focused on “wellness” no one defines what “well” is supposed to mean. Is someone “well” when they have occasional anxiety and do they become “unwell” after they have a panic attack? The medical community has so little education on where the line is between a “normal” amount of anxiety and an “abnormal” amount that how are parents without a medical degree supposed to know when to get their child help?
So, yes, we all know anxiety, but how well we know her is different for everyone, which should be taken into account when viewing Inside Out 2. We should also strive to create new systems in which everyone is more educated on how anxiety functions and when to get help or reach out to someone. But whether it's an acquaintance, a new friend, or someone you’ve known since childhood, we all know her, but we can always learn more about her.
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