MHM Magazine

Try looking at the world through the eyes of a South African teenager today… you’d be looking at escalating crime statistics, child trafficking and social media’s distorted reality of what life should look like. This leads to immense pressure to meet unrealistic expectations, whilst confronting the realities of having the highest unemployment rate in the world, inconsistent water supply, loadshedding, war, genocide, and the impending doom of climate change, which is already impacting people globally. Now, try to imagine what it’s like to be expected to care about things such as school grades. In relation to all these issues, why would you care? You don’t have to have depression or anxiety, for these issues to keep you up at night, disrupting your sleep, impacting your mood, energy, and motivation levels, leaving you with a general sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness regarding the future. Of course, if these issues are impacting you in these ways, the likelihood of you meeting the criteria for depression and/ or anxiety are very high. Which is where we, as healthcare professionals, need to be very careful not to pathologise an individual for what’s essentially a very understandable human reaction to very depressing and scary experiences. Just like with the note of caution to differentiate between grief and depression in the DSM, we need to be careful of not diagnosing a normal part of the human experience. A label used for this common human experience is existential dread, or an existential crisis, which has been explored for centuries and is by no means a new phenomenon. What’s of particular concern, is how it’s presenting in younger By Alexa Scher Alexa Scher Clinical Psychologist EXISTENTIAL DREAD IN TEENS MHM | 2024 | Volume 11 | Issue 2 | Existential Dread in Teens MHM Issue 2 | 2024 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 17 MHM