Teens and Anxiety

The number of adolescents and young adults being diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders is on the rise. Biblical counselor and pastor David Murray says we ought to be asking ourselves the question, why? There's been something really significant that's shifted in our culture. Something big has happened or maybe more than one thing that is producing this and depression stats are it's in the realm of 20% of teens by the time they reach adulthood will have had a clinical depression.

That's one in five. You know, you look at your kids, you look at your classes, you look at your churches, and you just go through like one, two, three, four, and yet it's strange we never talk about it. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com.

What is driving the increase in depression and anxiety among adolescents and young adults? We'll talk more about that today with our guest David Murray. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I don't know if there is anything much more relevant than what we're going to talk about today. I mean, I've been watching statistics of how many teenagers are struggling with issues of anxiety and depression, loneliness, alienation. It's growing.

It's increasing. And to know as a parent what to do if you're observing things with your teenager. I think a lot of parents are on high alert and then all of a sudden, by the way, it's 2020 and maybe there have been a few things going on this year that have increased anxiety and loneliness and alienation, depression. I think this is the topic that's causing parents to feel desperate for answers and help. And I think this is a great topic that we're going to discuss today. But it isn't just parents.

It's all of us. We, this past year before COVID, I think in 30 years, first time we've ever tackled mental health as a series weekend at church, did three messages in a row on it, and it was attended like nothing else. People are like, we need help in this area as parents, but just as adults and as kids. Well, how do we think about this? What do we do?

And with COVID, everything has increased, so it's on the rise. Yeah. I'm so glad David Murray is joining us to help us with this. David, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you.

It's wonderful to be with you here today. David is an author and a speaker for years now, a seminary professor at Puritan Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids. And he has an accent.

He does. You probably picked that up. This is cool.

You're going to love this. David is now a pastor at a local church in Grand Rapids, and someone who, as a part of your own personal spiritual journey, has dealt with the issues that you've written about in two books. One is Why Am I Feeling Like This?, and the other, Why Is My Teenager Feeling Like This?, books about anxiety and depression that was a part of your spiritual past, right? Yeah, very much.

It's something that you can know from a book, and it's something you can know from personal experience, and there are very different ways to learn about this topic. It was really my wife's depression, first of all, that really brought home to me the reality of mental illness and how a Christian can be depressed and can be anxious and how to deal with that. And then, yeah, for myself, just over the years, a couple of burnouts, which affected me physically, maybe more than emotionally, but that was there too.

Then raising teenage girls. Yeah, it's all around us, and it's wonderful to hear of you doing that series in your church. I hear more and more pastors doing this, and it's just such like a breaking of the dam for people.

It's like, at last, we can talk about this. Yeah, and the big tension was, if you're a follower of Christ, you don't struggle. You shouldn't struggle with anxiety, worry, depression, even suicidal thoughts.

And so people don't talk about it. And the church wasn't talking about it, and so to be able to go, this can be a part of even a Christian struggle, journey, which you've obviously walked through. Yeah, I have to be honest, that's what I believed when I came out of seminary. If you're depressed, you're either not a Christian or you're a Christian in terrible sin. That was my belief.

And it was utterly useless in counseling people with depression and anxiety as a result. And God in his providence put me in the North-West Highlands of Scotland to pastor where there's a huge rate of depression, largely due to we hardly see the sun for half the year. And then, yes, I said my own wife came down with it, and I knew she was far more godly than I was.

So, like, this turns my whole world upside down. I'm meeting lots of godly people who are going down with depression, and I know they're not living in sin. And I need to re-look at this and study and listen better. I think that was the first thing I started doing, and eventually wrote a book, Christians Get Depressed Too, which was really the opposite of what I used to believe. And yet, from what people tell me, it's been incredibly relieving. So, explain to us what we're talking about when we talk about depression. Is it more than just sadness over circumstances? Yeah, I think when I talk about depression, I try and talk about it in three dimensions.

I try and talk about the depth of feelings. So, yeah, we all have Monday morning blues. That's not depression.

It's much deeper. We also maybe have anxiety and things like that. We maybe have aches and pains in our bodies, all of which can be symptoms of anxiety, depression.

But you really need a width of these. You need to tick a lot of boxes for it to be eventually classed as that. And then there's length, which is how long it goes on for. In other words, a bad week, that's not depression. This going on two or three weeks, then you're beginning to look at depression, anxiety.

And I often speak of them together because they often come together in a lot of cases. So, you've got to look at the width, the depth, the length before you really move from just ordinary sadness to, yeah, a depression problem. What was your wife's experience? Yeah, the strange thing was she was actually a doctor and she was dealing a lot with people with depression. And yet when it came into her own life, she didn't recognize it and she couldn't accept it. In fact, she went where I was going to.

This must be a spiritual problem. And we actually spent a year or more in, I would say, torture, trying to find what was the sin, what was the problem, where had she gone wrong. She more than me because I kind of like knew from looking at her from the outside, this is not my wife. She's a godly woman. She loves the Lord and she lives for the Lord.

But what did you see? Well, I saw her just becoming eventually incapacitated, unable to work, unable to care for the kids and unable to sleep. Crying a lot of the time. And I would say to her, you know, why are you crying? You know, we're in a lovely congregation. God's given us lovely kids. Above all, you're married to me. You know, and she would say, David, all these things are true, but I can't stop crying. So like there wasn't a rational man comes with logic and rationale and no, it's not there.

You're not going to find it. And eventually we sort of realized it was actually around the birth of our fourth child. So it was a hormonal thing. She'd been homeschooling. She'd been doing some part time medical work.

She was a pastor's wife. We'd lived through a church split. It was really just multiple factors that eventually exhausted her body, which exhausted her mind, which exhausted her emotions. And the spiritual things we were focused on were not the cause, but the effect of that depression. That was a sort of light bulb moment for us that because we'd got the cause wrong, we weren't really getting the cures right.

And once we started focusing on the physical and the social, we really began to get some traction and her spiritual life began to revive again. Now, you know, this is something that there's a lot of kind of broad thinking on this subject. And some people would say, well, you said it's not a spiritual issue. How can it not be a spiritual issue? Yeah, I mean, there's a spiritual issue in every problem to some degree or another. We can't separate the soul from the body. The question is there always a primarily spiritual cause, which is, I believe, a mistake.

But one I believe that increasingly Christians are seeing as a mistake. So we don't ignore that side, but we don't focus exclusively on either. But try and take this holistic approach, looking at the physical, the emotional, the mental, the spiritual, the relational, and just trying to take that much more human approach. We're not just disembodied spirits. God's made us with bodies and that we're all connected. And therefore, when the body goes wrong, the soul goes wrong, the soul goes wrong, the body goes wrong.

You see that in the Bible, Psalm 51, Psalm 32. And so you need a holistic approach to causes and cures. Your new books are focused on how this is manifesting itself among adolescents. One book for the teenager and another book for the parents. What's unique about anxiety and depression among adolescents? In some ways there isn't anything unique, but we felt the books were required because obviously teen abilities to read and understand are different to an adult. Therefore, just trying to bring it down to an accessible level, really trying to base it around narrative stories of teens throughout the book that hopefully they can identify with. And also, although there's a lot of overlap in many of the symptoms and causes, there are some unique aspects of being a teen which really play into teen anxiety and depression as well.

And the stats you quote in the book are astronomical right now. Even the fact that the suicide rate's at a 30-year high among teenagers, what's going on? It's heartbreaking, Dave. It's hard to talk about it without getting emotional about it, you know, because I've seen so many of these kids and it's a dark pit that they're in. Something like 33% of teens will have an anxiety disorder.

That's not just, I'm feeling a wee bit edgy, it's an actual incapacitating, overwhelming disorder. One third. One third, yeah. And in fact, to put it into sort of real people, I was reading recently about a Christian woman counselor who went into counseling 24 years ago. One in 20 kids who came to her came with anxiety. Now it's 16 out of 20. And I think it reflects, there's been something really significant that's shifted in our culture. Something big has happened, or maybe more than one thing, that is producing this. And depression stats are, it's in the realm of 20% of teens by the time they reach adulthood will have had a clinical depression.

So that's one in five. You know, you look at your kids, you look at your classes, you look at your churches, and you just go through like one, two, three, four, five. I was going to say, that's scary. Yeah, it's scary. That's scary to hear as a parent.

And yet it's strange, we never talk about it. Yeah. Apart from Dave is now finally, yes, blazing the trail.

Three weeks. Yeah, yeah. And that's it. Seriously, though. Well, I know. I mean, you know, there are lots of moral problems in our world, and your program covers them wonderfully. But I wonder if we've got that balance right considering the proportion of people with these challenges compared to some of the issues we focus on. Why is it higher now? Why are the stats higher? What's happening?

I use this little word pits, P-I-T-A, because you end up in the pits. But I think the first one is pressure. The second one is instability. The third one is technology.

And the fourth one is spirit, spiritual problems. So pressure, teens are under just incredible pressure to perform today. I remember growing up, I mean, I'm 54, so what, 30, 40 years ago, I had exams twice a year. And I played in soccer. There was no training.

There was no workouts. You just turned up on Saturday and played for your school. And it was fun. And it was fun.

We just played pickup soccer at the park all the time. Now, I look at my teens and there's tests and exams and projects and assignments every day, every week for months and months and months. It's not just enough to play sport once a week.

It's three times a week and four times a week. And then they've got to get scholarships and they've got to be working and they've got to be doing voluntary work and they've got to be involved in their church. And I just think a lot of teens are being crushed. Some of it's parent driven, some of it's culture driven, school driven, some of it's themselves as well. So there's that huge pressure, I think, is at inordinate levels. And then the instability that they're seeing all around them. But I think especially post 9-11, it's very different worlds. Shootings and schools. Shootings and schools.

Yeah, that's massive. Family instability. That's the thing that came to mind for me. How many families are healthy, nurturing, intact families? Yeah. And even if you're in one, you're surrounded by breakups everywhere and kids worry, you know, is it going to be me next?

Is it going to be our family next? I mean, I think back to my childhood, you know, again, a long time ago. But think about the kids sitting in a classroom today. They have drills about what to do if a shooter walks in.

Did we ever have that? We had a- Tornado drill. Tornado drill.

We went outside. That was the fire drill. Oh, yeah.

Tornado drill. See, I can't remember. It's so long ago. But I mean, I was thinking I was the only kid in our entire elementary school.

Had to be a thousand kids or 500 kids. That's from a divorced home. Yeah, right.

And again, not saying anything about the culture today. I know. I know. It's a different world.

You talk about instability and pressure. Yeah. Hey, here's another thing.

You used the same example. I can remember summer, I led the league in home runs across the street at the church with my buddies. We didn't have a league.

No. We didn't play little league until, you know, 10 or 11 years old. And now I coached it.

I watched an eight-year-old with bases loaded strike out to lose the game and walk to his car with his head down. That pressure. Then again, it should just be fun. But man, it is taken to a high level. And you think that doesn't affect a kid at eight and 18 years old? It sure does.

Unforgettable. And we feel the pressure as parents thinking if they don't get in the right soccer league, they won't make it to the next level. And so then we, I think, put that pressure on our kids unknowingly. Exactly. And it really does affect them. So pressure, instability.

Yeah. Let me add one thing onto that instability. I think this gender instability, too, is another huge destabilizing force in our schools. I'm hearing some just horrendous stories about this. Talk about that.

What's that mean? Well, just the, you know, like take, for example, one school I know of, they're in one class. There were 15 girls and five of them are now going through gender transition.

The majority of transitions are female to male. What age? That's middle school. Yeah.

Not even high school. So a lot of instability. Technology was the third one, the T. The digital overwhelm, which I think is hyperstimulation of a very tender teenage brain. They're just not up to this amount of stimulation and intensity. Brains need downtime. They need quiet time.

They need still time. And we are exhausting them. Just, we never put our devices down.

We can't stop at a red light without checking. And that's bad enough for adults, but for a teen brain that's just making connections and is being formed, I think it's very damaging. Information overload on that front too. Our teens know like the worst things that are going on in the world as soon as they happen 24-7 with live video coverage. Things that I might have picked up the newspaper once a week when I was a teen. And I might have seen a little paragraph somewhere about, you know, the latest war disaster.

And now it's just 24-7 coverage. And that tech world brings the first two into play as well. It's all mixed up. Pressure and instability because I'm comparing to my other friends and seeing what's happening in their homes and how perfect and it never ends. The social media. That's the depression part I thought of is that the comparison that's going on as you're looking on Instagram or Facebook and seeing all my friends are this and that shot looks better and they've got a boyfriend and life looks good for them and it doesn't feel good for me. And that comparison is driving a lot of kids to despair. I'm depressed listening to this. This is not the most uplifting of broadcasts, is it?

But it's enlightening. Well, I think when people hear it, they begin to say, aha, that explains it. And I think that is one of the worst things about anxiety and depression. It feels like this came out of the blue, like I'm a total victim.

It's just inexplicable and none of us like that. We like to feel like there's cause and there's effect. So it's actually a major element in healing when you understand the causes because then you get something to get your hands on and you can grab hold of and say, okay, this is not just like accidental or bad luck.

There are some factors here that if I understand the causes, then I can begin to look at some cures. And the S is the spiritual dimension? The spiritual dimension, yes. So again, it goes back to technology.

Dave, as you said, it's all mixed up. But the pornography issue is causing huge guilt and shame, which is devastating to kids' growth and development in every way, but especially spiritually. It distances them from God, the only one who can give them an uplift, the only one who can calm their fears, makes them not want to read their Bibles, don't want to pray, don't want to go to church. And I think if you also look at just the general spiritual and moral culture, the relativism, the multi-faithism, it's very shaking to kids to have just, well, you know, if like 100 people have 100 different religions, how do I know mine is right? And maybe, you know, as churches, we've shut down questioning at times instead of helping teens with their question, we've got answers. But unless we create a culture of you can ask the worst questions you can possibly imagine, and I'm not going to drop dead in front of you, and I'm not going to kill you either, you know, that's where we've got to get to, to help them process some of these spiritual questions, spiritual doubts, which left unresolved can cause a really deep-seated fear and anxiety.

And there's also the aspect, again, I'm thinking of the teenager, maybe that's a part of a church and maybe going to youth group, and there's the stigma at that church or in that youth group or in that small group. You can't talk about darkness or just anxiety. You sort of put the mask on, because I'm a church kid, I'm good. Hey, how you doing, Bob?

Oh, I'm good. You may really be struggling with suicidal thoughts, or maybe you've got a porn problem that has caused you to doubt. You just hide all that, put on the mask, and it's not allowed to be talked about. Is that a part of the spiritual part, too?

Because it's covered. Yeah. They're living in darkness, but nobody knows because they're not supposed to share weakness. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think this is especially where youth pastors have a tremendous responsibility as well as opportunity, that instead of every event being a let's G everyone up and no, let's be real. Let's just be honest with one another. We're not all good. We're not all happy.

We're not all at peace. Let's talk about that. So, I've heard you talk about environmental and emotional contributors, spiritual contributors. You haven't brought up the biological or the medical side of this, and again, there's debate on some of this.

And you're married to a doctor, right? If a teenager is experiencing depression, does that mean there's something going on in their brain? Yeah, when I'm talking about pits, we were talking about the cultural factors playing into depression there. But yes, there's definitely a physical element in many depressions.

And here's the best way I've found to illustrate this. If you're out in the woods one day and you meet a bear, our fight or flight system switches on. Our adrenaline and cortisol pumps into our bodies. Our blood thickens. Our muscles get stronger. Our senses get more acute and sensitive.

Why does this happen? It's a God-given survival system God's given us so that when we do face danger, we can either fight it and win or run away and win. Or if the bear does get us, well, the blood's thickened up and hopefully we won't bleed out, you know?

So, this is a good thing. The fight or flight system is a good thing, a stress response system. But it should switch off after about 20 minutes. Either you've beaten the bear, you've run away from the bear, or you're in the bear's stomach. The problem is sometimes that system stays switched on. Or it switches on for no good reason whatsoever. Or maybe after many traumas, difficulties, challenges, stresses for a long period of time, it's heightened.

It's not at exactly bear level, but it's not at chill level. And this is very unhealthy for our bodies because these are bad chemicals in big doses. And they eventually start affecting our brain, our nervous system, our blood, our oxygen levels. And it's like almost you're sitting in your car with your foot in the accelerator, revs at the highest level, what's eventually going to happen?

That car's going to eventually fall apart. So, when we're putting our teenagers under all this pressure, they're feeling this instability, they are being overwhelmed with technology, hyper-stimulated, and keyed up all the time by that. And the spiritual challenge is you put all that together and you've got kids who are in constant fight or flight mode, whose stress response system is just up there all the time and it's never down. And eventually that wears and tears on the body and the brain, initially with anxiety.

And then when everything crashes, you plummet into depression. And that's involuntary, right? I'm in the fight and flight. So, if I'm a teenager or an adult and I'm in fight and flight and I can't stop it, I feel like somebody's pushing the accelerator and it's not me, what do I do? Yeah, well, I think that's where sympathy has to come in, isn't it? We don't want to come to our teens and condemn them or critique them.

We want to have compassion. We want to say, this is an awful experience. This is not necessarily your fault. There are many factors that have played into this. I know one young woman, she had four bereavements in her family in one year.

That's four great losses, four great stresses. If you weren't depressed and anxious at the end of that, that would be a miracle. That's normal, not abnormal.

I like to call it normal abnormality. And now, of course, if a kid is deliberately exposing themselves to hyperstimulation, like horror movies, gory video games, the worst media pornography, then you've got to hold your hands up and say, okay, I've got a degree of guilt here and we can deal with that. We can bring that to the cross. We can get that removed and give you a fresh start by the grace of God and the atonement of Christ. So, you know, whatever, whether you're to blame or not to blame, there are ways forward out of this. And I think that's the overall message I hope that we'll get across today in our discussion that, bad though the problems are, God has provided multiple solutions. And we want to spend some time dealing with those solutions.

I think we've illuminated the problem today and we're going to continue the conversation and talk about the solutions. But that's where you go in the book you've written for teenagers and the one you've written for parents. The teenager's book is called Why Am I Feeling Like This? A Teen's Guide to Freedom from Anxiety and Depression. And then there's a book for parents called Why Is My Teenager Feeling Like This?

To help you understand what's going on with your teen and to help prepare you to walk the path with them that leads them to a better place. We've got copies of both of David's books in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order them from us online at familylifetoday.com. Or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy of either or both of these books. Again, go to familylifetoday.com to order Why Am I Feeling Like This? The book on anxiety and depression for teens.

Or Why Is My Teenager Feeling Like This? Or you can call to order 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. We want to take just a minute and express how grateful we are for Family Life Today listeners who do more than just listen. I'm talking specifically about the Family Life Today listeners who have made today's program possible, either as monthly legacy partners or as people who from time to time will make a donation in support of the ministry of Family Life Today.

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You can donate online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation. Thanks in advance for your support, and I hope the book is helpful for you or for whoever you wind up passing it on to. We appreciate hearing from you. And we hope you can join us back tomorrow. We're going to continue our conversation with David Murray about anxiety and depression among teens and young adults.

We're going to talk about the various means of grace God has made available to help us deal with these emotional and spiritual issues in our lives. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.