As of last year, public health officials in the U.S. had declared that teens here were experiencing a mental health crisis. A new study reveals some of the factors that might contribute to teens and adults developing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.
“Our research team investigated how loneliness in adolescence, both in isolation and in interaction with low resilience, affects anxiety and depression in young adulthood,” explained Nayan Deepak Parlikar, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU’s) Department of Public Health and Nursing, according to a press release from the university. She’s the author of the study recently published in the Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology journal and she has written on the subject before.
Along with the teen mental health crisis, public health officials in recent years have said that Americans overall are going through a loneliness epidemic. Per a 2023 advisory, too many Americans lacked social connections important to maintaining mental health.
Resilience, on the other hand is a measure of healthy functioning despite adverse circumstances, as explained research published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal in 2020. For the recent study, researchers assessed loneliness “via a single-item measure, while resilience was estimated using the Resilience Scale for Adolescents.”
“Adolescents who experience both loneliness and low resilience are at significantly greater risk of developing anxiety and depression compared with other groups,” said the NTNU press release. Researches used longitudinal data from The Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT) to track adolescents (13–19 years) from Young-HUNT3 (2006-08) through to HUNT4 (2017-19).
Parlikar and her team compared groups of adolescents who reported high resilience and low levels of loneliness with groups of adolescents who reported high resilience and high levels of loneliness, and adolescents with low resilience and low loneliness. Both low resilience and high loneliness were associated with negative outcomes alone as well.
“Loneliness affects youth’s diurnal cortisol, a key stress hormone potentially causing chronic increases in cortisol in young adulthood, leading to higher risks of depression, anxiety, inflammation, and other adverse health outcomes,” said the researchers.
They also said that: “individuals with low psychological resilience seem to have compromised control of brain circuits involved in emotion and fear and poor cortico-limbic inhibition, representing a dysregulated emotional response to stress that may result in elevated cortisol exposure.”
Being a teenager comes with unavoidable challenges, from puberty to, peer pressure and academic expectations, the Mayo Clinic noted. Teen years are also a time when adolescents strive to be independent from their families.
While this is normal, it can also contribute to heightened exposure to loneliness, authors of the recent study explained. If teens striving for that independence fail to make intimate social and emotional connections with their peers, they can risk facing loneliness that puts them at risk for mental health challenges.
“Health professionals working with young people should concentrate on identifying individuals with both loneliness and low resilience at an early stage. Once they have been identified, it is important to intervene quickly,” said Parlikar.
She said that programs to support social skills and resilience could be key ways to help, as well as group therapy with family.
“It is important that schools, clubs and communities work together to prevent loneliness and exclusion, and to create a safe and inclusive environment,” added supervisor Unni Karin Moksnes, a professor at the Department of Public Health and Nursing at NTNU. “A sense of belonging has a huge impact on children and adolescents’ health and quality of life.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 5 million adolescents in the U.S. aged 12 to 17 (20% of that population) had at least one major depressive episode in 2021. Prevalance of these episodes was higher among adolescent females (29.2%) compared to males (11.5%) and was highest among adolescents reporting two or more races (27.2%).