Rowan Blanchard, 14-year-old star of Girl Meets World, spoke out against the celebrity #squadgoals phenomenon, Instagram trolls and wrote an essay about intersectional feminism on Tumblr in 2015.
It’s early days for 2016 but she’s already shared a personal essay about mental health via her Instagram account, writing about her own experiences of depression.
‘…going through ups and downs with depression, I realized that instead of rejecting and ostracizing these teenage feelings (human feelings), I can learn to love the intensity of them and know that everything is momentary. When I think about this year, I would usually associate it with one specific emotion/adjective (happy, sad, amazing, et cetera), but I can’t – there’s too many. I learned this year that happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive. They can exist within me at the same time in the same moment. While also becoming more forgiving of myself and my emotions, I became more forgiving of others, specifically other teenagers. I realized that it is really weird to grow up right now, and that maybe I shouldn’t expect other teenagers to have it all figured out if I can’t.’
What Rowan has touched upon is just how common mental health disorders are among young people. According to Young Minds, mental health problems affect 1 in 10 children and young people aged from 5 to 16. That’s around three children in every school class in the UK, and yet, understanding about and treatment for this is still pretty poor.
In the UK mental health still isn’t on the national curriculum. This is why what Rowan has written is important because it increases awareness about the mental health problems that people experience early on in life which are all too often dismissed and overlooked. A ‘teen mental health crisis’is currently being identified in Britain.
Figures suggest that more than half of all adults with mental health problems were diagnosed in childhood. And, crucially, less than half of them were treated appropriately at the time.
Being a teenager is tricky, you have more of life ahead of you than you have behind you so, inevitably, your frame of reference is much smaller. It’s difficult to catalogue, identify and understand your feelings even if you don’t suffer from mental health problems. In the days before social media, many people simply didn’t talk about their experiences; today posts like Rowan’s show those who do suffer that they’re not alone.
And, if you think about it, mental health in teenagers, particularly among teenage girls, has long been romanticised in music and film. The ‘manic pixie dream girl’ (as often played by Kirsten Dunst) is a trope that we’re used to seeing, and it’s one which presents mental health disorders as somehow attractive and alluring as opposed to laying bare the very unglamorous nature of what it’s like to suffer with depression, anxiety or any other mental health disorder.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.