THE HSE is reaching out to teenagers to urge them to reach out and “let someone know” if life is getting them down.

Earlier this month, it published another report focusing on their mental health, and also announced a website – www.letsomeoneknow.ie – aimed at encouraging teenagers to confide in someone they trust when worried, rather than “bottle it all up”.

One of the findings of the report by Millard Brown-Lansdowne, Young People and Mental Health, is that teenagers feel older adults don’t understand them and that teenagers are under different pressures from the rest of the population.

But haven’t we heard this all before? In fact, hasn’t it always been thus?

Apparently not. Experts and professionals working with 13-17 year olds say many teenagers today are experiencing crises not faced by their peers even 10 years ago, and enduring them in an adult world which is, itself, in crisis.

The report was commissioned foremost because of an alarming increase in levels of deliberate self-harm among teenagers, says Geoff Day, director of the HSE’s Office of Suicide Prevention.

“The two age groups with the highest levels of deliberate self-harm [DSH] are the 15-19 years among females and the 19-24 years among males. And the age at which people are self-harming is getting younger. There are reports of DSH now by kids as young as eight and nine.”

Tom Casey, a counsellor with Teen Counselling, an adolescent counselling service operated by the Dublin Archdiocese, also speaks of a “noticeable increase in incidence of self-harm and suicidal ideation” among his young clients.

The most common forms of DSH are self-cutting and overdose and, according to Day, while there are about 11,000 incidents of DSH presenting at AEs annually, it is thought there may be up to 60,000 unreported occurrences each year.

And though this is the urgent rationale behind the report and the website, the need for them points to unprecedented levels of stress, anxiety and emotional isolation among teenagers.

Susan Quirke, communications officer with the Spunout.ie website, an information and discussion platform used mainly by teenagers, agrees that “this is a profoundly difficult time to be a teenager”, adding: “There are huge numbers of teenagers coming to us in crisis.”

Unprompted, she adds: “Self- harm is on the increase.”

The three biggest problems teenagers surveyed in the Millard-Brown report identified were alcohol, drugs and peer pressure.

Immediately, when asked what were the main pressures in their lives, Ali Jack (16) from Swords, Co Dublin, and Cormac Teevlin, (17), from Co Cavan, mentioned exam pressures, and then “going out” and the pressure to drink alcohol.

“I don’t know a person who wouldn’t go out and get locked at the weekends,” says Ali. “There is peer pressure to drink, and I can’t say it’s everybody, but it is the thing on Monday morning; it’s what everyone is talking about, it’s ‘how drunk somebody got’.”

According to Cormac: “When you go out now there is pressure on you to drink as much as you can, and to drink spirits, usually straight vodka.

“Sometimes you wouldn’t really feel like going out at the weekend, maybe you’d prefer to stay in and study or watch TV, but the texts would start coming, ‘Are you coming out?’ and you’d be slagged if you didn’t go.”

Ali speaks of the pressure to have the “right” fashions, to be slim and to be at the “right” parties. “I remember in first and second year we’d be sitting eating whatever we felt like. Now it’s all salads and tuna and sweetcorn for lunch. You don’t want to be overweight because that wouldn’t look right.

“And there’s definitely pressure to have the latest fashions and be out every weekend. But where are we supposed to get the money for it?”

She had a part-time job during the summer and says some in her class have kept theirs “to have money for the weekend”, and so are juggling studies, socialising and employment.

She also refers to how the internet exacerbates the social pressures. “People have their pictures of what they did at the weekend up on their Bebo pages on Monday.”

The digital age has made their lives more public and rapidly paced than was imaginable even in the 1990s.

Both speak of the pressure to appear “happy” and “cool”. Cormac notes teenagers “are self-centred and no one asks you how you are” anymore.

“You’d hear the stuff that’s going on in some fella’s family, but then to see him out at the weekend there’d be no sign of it. He’d seem to be in great form, but he might be overdoing it on the drink.”

Says Ali: “There’s a whole ‘emo’ scene – the ones who go around in dark clothes, acting all depressed. If someone says they’re feeling down, people will say they are just ‘being an emo’, looking for attention.”

She says if she needs to talk to someone, she’d talk to friends. “My parents might not understand. It depends on the problem.”

Cormac, too, intimates adults may not always be the ones he’d turn to first.

“Sometimes you think they have enough problems. You don’t want to hassle them.”

As with teenagers in the report, both agree a good family life is an important protector of good mental health.

And herein, believes adolescent counsellor Tom Casey, lie the roots of the main anxieties of today’s teenagers. Families are spending less casual time together. Teenagers have televisions, music and computers in their rooms, and families aren’t eating together. Added to that, often both parents are working.

“It all means increased isolation and far fewer opportunities for regular, indirect conversations, which are often the best ways to approach teenagers and tease out issues with them.

“Sometimes the only contact between parents and their teenagers is when they are ferrying them around in the car.”

Casey agrees teenagers are genuinely often misunderstood by older adults and their “real and, often fair” anxieties dismissed. “Within families teenagers often don’t represent themselves very well. Their concerns can be imparted in a negative way. But the underlying concern can be quite sensible. For example, they may be complaining a sibling is being spoilt. I do find teenagers are usually very fair-minded, but they may come across as unreasonable.”

Quirke of Spunout.ie says adults are themselves in crisis, and this must be addressed.

“A lot of adults are lost. You only have to look at the levels of debt, alcohol consumption, relationship breakdown and depression. Young people are meant to look to them for guidance and many don’t like the reality of the adult world they see.

“Is it any wonder so many are looking for escape in alcohol, drugs, sex, computer games?” she asks.

Day agrees that adults too have work to do to reach out to teenagers.

Casey stresses the need to remember teenagers were children not long ago and will not have fully developed adult ways in articulating themselves. “They will swing from being an adult one minute to wanting a hug from mum the next.

“I always say though that if you can move the teenager into a quiet space, listen to them and treat them with respect, you’ll be able to separate out the genuine issue from the apparent misbehaviour.

“You will find teenagers are, in the main, a rock of sense.”

Useful websites:

www.letsomeoneknow.ie

www.spunout.ie