Building youth resilience
From an article by Bold
Jennifer Lau, Professor and Co-director of the Youth Resilience Unit, Queen Mary University of London is a research psychologist with an interest in understanding how common mental health difficulties such as anxiety, depression, arise in young people, and also in identifying ways to help and support young people.
In a recent interview, she reflected on the role of social connections in the community in building resilience in young people:
Resilience is the ability to recover following adverse experiences, such as school pressure or family conflict. Although it is often considered an individual trait, placing the responsibility to cope on the individual alone is misguided.
The term 'Resilience' is now commonly applied to the concept to mental health and emotional wellbeing – think of the term ‘bounce back’, for example. Researchers like me are trying to understand how people respond to adverse or stressful events. Do they go back to normal? Do they recover better than expected? Some people can even benefit from challenging experiences. In my research, we’re exploring young people’s capacity to respond to adversity, including the daily stresses of life.
We’re particularly interested in resilience in the face of emotional difficulties or challenges – for example, how some young people flourish academically and socially despite adversity or stressful events. Resilience is important because it prevents more extreme emotional responses, such as poor mental health or mental health difficulties from developing.
At the Youth Resilience Unit, we take a broad, holistic view of youth resilience. Therapist and resilience researcher, Michael Ungar noticed that theorists were thinking about resilience as something individual – an ability that we each have in varying degrees, like perseverance or grit. Yet while resilience can include these traits, Ungar argued, it is more about navigating resources – both social and non-social – that are available in the wider environment.
The wider environment can include forms of support within the family and family relationships, support offered in the local neighbourhood through schools, and support in the wider community, such as youth clubs, sports, and recreational activities. This view of resilience is helpful because it takes the onus off individuals to be responsible for their own wellbeing, and instead focuses on opportunities for collective input and action. It says that resilience is also a feature of the community. There is strength in building resilience through the community as well as within the individual.
We should focus on helping young people utilise support in their environment in a way that helps them manage or overcome their difficulties. Focusing on individuals can send a message to young people that if they can’t manage on their own, they’re weak, and this is not necessarily the case.
There are things you can teach or train in young people, so individual factors are important but we need to think about the circumstances that have given rise to the symptoms. It is important to integrate young people into communities where they have access to social support.
It is important to work with young people and the community to better understand the adversities they face and how we can build resilience. For example, we work in a community with a young and diverse population in a low-resource setting. These young people face various challenges stemming from social issues, such as income inequality or low socioeconomic status. Low socioeconomic status is often associated with overcrowded housing, a lack of spaces to meet people, and overburdened schools. Many of the mental health difficulties we see are triggered or exacerbated by such circumstances. Unless the community addresses the relevant social circumstances, young people will still find themselves in the situations that gave rise to the mental health difficulties in the first place.
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From an article by Bold, 07/02/2024