Elleana Tanner, of Laguna Hills, left, and Alejandra Barba, of Orange, attend the OC Pride festival in Santa Ana in June.
The challenges reported by the poll are “extremely concerning,” said Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, who was not involved in the survey. When asked to pick a word that described how they felt about their generation's future, the two dominant feelings were uncertainty and worry.
This summer, the endowment helped host a two-day summit aimed at working with young people to find ways to respond to what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has said is anYoung people who participated in the survey and spoke to The Times described mental health difficulties made significantly worse by isolation and loneliness during lockdowns and school closures.
Eventually, she managed to get into intensive outpatient therapy for a year, which improved her mental health significantly.“The accessibility to therapists or resources that can help is very lacking,” she said. “I feel like there’s such a misallocation of money. It’s a huge problem.” Her junior year in high school was entirely remote. She had been a strong student but found it difficult to focus online or feel motivated. Some days she spent hours scrolling through TikTok videos.
Terra Bransfield, 22, a student at Sonoma State University, said she has struggled with body image issues and disordered eating. But she feels fortunate to have a supportive family and a close circle of friends with whom she feels comfortable talking about mental health. Just over 4 in 10 respondents had talked with a therapist or other health professional about mental health issues. And 1 in 4 said they would like to talk with a professional but had not done so.
A trend of worsening mental health among young Californians that was exacerbated because the State is being controlled by Democrats for much too long.
No surprise. If only there were resources