I don’t want to hijack other threads so I will begin the discussion on how to acquire life skills in a modern world.
I’m going to sound horrible, but what most self diagnose as anxiety and depression are infect just regular difficulties faced by everyone.
Being given tools to be able to face problems is a skill that is not being taught and reinforced by families and schools. Knowing how to problem solve and prioritise are a very important skills.
Having the knowledge of one’s self to be able to self-regulate is also something that could be taught in schools.
I think many see schools as a place to gather knowledge but sometimes are too focused on book skills and not on life skills.
I teach young children in a school here in Taiwan. I often see otherwise fantastic children unable to overcome problems socially or with their work, they can’t self-regulate their emotions and behaviours and often act out as a result.
I remember when I was very young being given many responsibility around the family home, farms and businesses. As a result as an adult I have been able to overcome many problems and difficult times. Quite young I achieved many successes that others would become envious of.
These are modern world problems and I’m wondering as parents, as guardians, as teachers, as human beings what lessons have you taught and how have you approached others who have difficulty with life problems?
modern parents are far too busy to care. The reality of the economy today means both parents must work. If they have children at all they have little choice but throw them to a daycare or whatever, where they just don’t care how the child(ren) develops their social skills or if they have any issues (such as asperger’s).
So the reality is, schools and daycare do not have any vested interest in children under their care, except as a money making operation. Parents must work and are too busy to deal with domestic affairs. This leads to children growing up without a father/mother.
There’s a reason for traditional family structure where only the father works while the mother stays with the children. But such family is the exception, not the rule.
Completely agree. I would add that part of the reason kids are not taught life skills is that most parents don’t have those skills in the first place. Probably the same is true for teachers and their bosses. So nobody even knows that those skills are important. A lack of coping skills is also tacitly encouraged by politicians because it fosters a dependence on the State and ready acceptance of solutions offered by government (such as “affordable childcare”).
I didn’t post in the depression thread because this sort of view is usually unwelcome. But it’s a solid fact - it’s been known for decades - that people with depression (and I mean clinical depression, not just unhappiness misdiagnosed as depression) often have very real problems at the root of their syndrome.
I would suggest the biggest issue with attempting to pass on life skills is that the majority of people who don’t have them don’t want them. Of course there are good ways and bad ways to offer people suggestions; unless someone recognises that they need to acquire some specific skill and actively asks about it, there’s usually not much you can do. This is true for kids too; if they’re not interested, they’re not interested. It takes a certain sort of … well, it’s probably a life skill - to foster enthusiasm in people/kids who have none.
Like I have depression because growing up I have a completely distorted view of social interaction. My parents kinda gaslit me quite a bit growing up, making it seem like everyone hates me, or that every social interactions that went well in my opinion went very badly according to my parents. I don’t even know if they did this intentionally. As a result I generally assume that everyone hates me and that every interactions I have I keep asking myself if I did something bad or embarrassing.
That’s nonsense. i was a kid 35 years ago, and me all my friends had 2 working parents.
If anything i think the problem is “over-caring” in Taiwan.
I dont see in Taiwan the things that used to be an integral part of my childhood: I used to go/come back from school by myself, my parents used to send me to the store to buy stuff (milk/eggs/bread) , go to the park to play soccer / basketball in the afternoon…
I have been here close to 13 years, and have never seen a kid alone in a store buying eggs… Hardly see kids walking to school.
Anxiety is just that though, regular difficulties.
Anxiety is the interplay between three emotions: fear, worry and nervousness. Everyone has anxiety, it’s an evolutionary necessity. I think it’s good that more people self diagnose this as they can then start to untangle their emotions and have a better understanding of them.
Telling kids to toughen up is shitty, toxic, abusive advice. Not that you were suggesting that.
Kate Collins-Donnelly has written a series of books, “Starving the (anxiety/stress/anger) gremlin,” which help young people better understand their emotions so they can grow and understand themselves better.
During uni I shared a house with a guy who suffered from panic attacks. I’m not sure which specific life skills could have helped him deal with these. I used to tell him to relax and take deep breaths, but it didn’t work.
No to medication. Panic attacks are not dangerous and are not physically harmful for the body. CBT and talking therapy is recommended.
Panic attacks can be symptomatic of other issues, such a depression, for which medication can be prescribed. However, there’s new evidence to suggest that low levels of serotonin is not the cause of many psychological difficulties and so SSRI medications are probably useless.
There’s too much disinformation out there about mental health.
Good luck getting CBT in Taiwan. The only treatment that I ever gotten, or rather NHI will pay for, is drugs. Everything else you pay out of pocket. I actually have no idea what CBT is or what it looks like as no doctors in Taiwan will give them.
It’s actually cognitive behavioural treatment. It’s used to treat some types of past traumatic events. I had a friend who had that style of treatment toPTSD. It’s very brutal and not many can suffer it.
Unfortunately Taiwan’s management of mental health is pretty backward.
There’s nothing magical about CBT. It basically involves getting people to change their habits (usually stepwise), and over time our brains start filling in justifications for why these new actions are being performed. Eventually new scripts are created and the new habits become second nature. While there is usually some attempt to get the patient to discuss why certain patterns of behaviour are unhelpful (and why the new ones are better), IMO this is mostly superfluous.
You can, incidentally, use the same technique to make people perform completely irrational rituals.
Given the number of mass shootings I can’t say America’s management of mental health is any better… They have good mental health treatment available, if you can afford it.
Though im not sure how you will actually manage in the pool