Getting to the Root Cause

On 60 Minutes this past Sunday, there was a story on the dramatic rise of anxiety levels among teens. It rightly noted that these levels were on a rapid rise before the onset of the pandemic. Five years ago, the director of the Counseling Center at Appalachian State University said they could hire as many counselors as possible and they still would be unable to meet the demand for services. Anxiety is by far the most often cited presenting problem for university counseling center clients.

What has been the response to this crisis? Mainly, treating the symptoms. More than one-third of college students now take anti-anxiety medication. The use of this medication has doubled in the past ten years. Residential Assistants in dorms (college students themselves) are now tasked with dealing with panic attacks and students attempting (and often succeeding) suicide. Their anxiety levels are also on the rise due to these situations.

The question that needs to be asked (and some experts are, like Jean M. Twenge) what has been going on in our culture over the past ten plus years to bring teenagers to such points of despair?  American medical professionals are great at finding treatments for all kinds of ailments, but what we often lack is the will and resiliency to find the root causes of symptoms, whether that be cancer, peanut allergies, or anxiety.

The crisis of anxiety among young people (including those professing to be followers of Jesus) has become so acute that, as the Counseling Center director said, even if we can train thousands of counselors and other mental health professionals, it will not be enough. We have to drill down to find the root causes for several generations finding it difficult to cope with life.

One clear suspect is the smart phone, which the vast majority of pre-teens and teens use at increasingly earlier ages. Dr. Twenge zeros in on that one in particular. Another one is young people managing to escape learning responsibilities that come along with adult life, such home chores, part-time jobs, and driving. In my work as a campus pastor, I worked with countless students, and increasingly so as the years past, who had few real-life skills. They struggled with management of both time and money. They struggled with following through on commitments. And to the point on anxiety, they struggled, as a university psychiatrist once said using an acrobatic metaphor, with balancing more than one plate at a time.

Most of the students I worked with grew up in homes where the parents were self-professing Christians and were involved in a local church. Yet, there was little difference in how they handled life compared to their non-believing peers. They were just as anxious and struggled with handling many of the basic responsibilities of life. And present were both contributing factors to the nationwide anxiety crisis-smart phones and lack of emerging life skills.

But there is one other contributing factor for teens in Christian homes—they are not acquiring the foundations of faith in their lives. Yes, they go to church and perhaps attend youth group, but are their parents exhibiting in practical and meaningful ways what it looks like to follow Jesus? Are they models of true disciples of Jesus? Are they teaching their children about the Lord? (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) This has been lacking for a long time in the American Christian home. Parents typically take their kids to church and make sure they are involved in the youth programs, but rarely do they consider themselves the primary spiritual leaders of their kids. They rather leave that to the professionals. And the symptoms of this are the majority of teens leaving high school forsaking the faith or entering adulthood with a shallow, ineffective  faith.

The local church has for a long time attempted to treat these symptoms by creating large and innovative programs for their youth, but as I have shown in my book, Letters from Downstream, these have not worked to solve the problem, just as anti-anxiety medication will not solve the problem of anxiety among teens. We must get to the root cause, and that is this: the local church has failed to encourage parents to take spiritual leadership of their children and spiritually prepare them to do it.

In this present crisis among teens, these problems of faith and anxiety have coalesced to expose a problem for the Church—Jesus seems to make little difference in how our young people cope with life. Obviously, Jesus is not the problem. That leaves us. The question is, what are we going to do about it to solve the problem?

Obviously, we need to meet our young people where they are at in life. They may genuinely require medication and therapy in their present circumstances. Yet, this should never be considered a normal way of life, particularly for those who proclaim Jesus as their Savior and Lord. If he doesn’t make a difference, what hope do we have?

© Jim Musser 2022 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011.