The One-Hour Intervention That Can Change Your Teen’s Life
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The teen years are a time of huge physical, mental and social change, and they’re a prime time for emotional highs and lows. Statistics show that 11 percent of teenagers are diagnosed with depression by age 18, and almost all teens exhibit depressive symptoms from time to time (remember listening to The Cure on repeat?). According to Jill Weber, a clinical psychologist who works with adolescent patients, one reason for these negative feelings is that many teens feel stuck — they believe they were born a certain way and they’re not sure that things can change or get better for them.
“Kids hear a lot that they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and ‘gifted’… or not,” Weber tells Yahoo Parenting. “These and countless other labels make it harder for teenagers to recognize that things are not always black and white — that they themselves are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but works in progress.” So if a teen has been called a loser, he may feel like he’ll always be one; it’s hard to see the bigger picture.
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But a study in the journal Clinical Psychological Science suggests that there may be a simple way to steer teens away from these negative perceptions: Convince them that their situation — socially, academically and personally — can change. David Scott Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and lead researcher in the study, tested six hundred 9th grade students at three different schools with the idea that letting kids know that life can transform and get better might help them ward off depression. The study’s results are impressive.
“We were amazed that a brief exposure to the message that people can change, during a key transition — the first few weeks of high school — could prevent increases in symptoms of depression,” Yeager said in a press release. “It doesn’t come close to solving the whole problem. Yet finding anything promising has the potential to be important because prevention is far better than treatment — not only for financial reasons but also because it avoids human suffering.”
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The 600 freshmen in the study were separated into two groups at the beginning of the year, an experimental and a control group. In the time of one class period, students in the experimental group read passages about the changeable nature of both bullies and their victims. They also read about brain plasticity and looked at messages from older students reinforcing the fact that personality transformations are possible. The freshmen then wrote their own notes to future ninth graders about how people can change. In contrast, the control group studied how athletic ability can shift over time, which doesn’t address the flexible nature of personality.
At the end of the year, a follow-up with all of the teenagers showed that, in the control group, rates of clinically significant depressive symptoms such as negative mood, feelings of ineffectiveness and low self-esteem increased about 39%, a statistic that is common for 9th grade. However, the kids in the experimental group who read about how personalities can change — even the ones who said they were bullied — showed no increase in depressive symptoms.
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Can an hour-long reading and writing exercise really make that much of a difference in a teenager’s life? Weber thinks so. “This kind of early intervention is an extremely powerful way to help with teen depression,” she says. “Teaching teens that they are changeable beings helps them to feel hopeful about the future.”
