#injured by peace

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Holly Korbey

Published: Dec 20, 2022

Assistant professor Brett Mallon begins his evening Zoom session at Kansas State University with a question: When students hear the word “conflict,” what associations do they make? 

Many first responses are decidedly negative. “I would say, avoid it at all costs,” one student offers. “Argument, awkward conversations,” says another. The list grows as students make emotional associations they have with conflict: stress, discomfort, war. Only one student suggests that he thinks of conflict as “an opportunity for growth.” 

This is Conflict Resolution, a non-credit workshop in an “Adulting 101” series at Kansas State. The cheeky name, created by the campus wellness center, belies its serious purpose: to fill in the gaps of missing life skills for students with classes that range from the practical, like how to make a budget, to the relational, like dealing with imposter syndrome. 

“Students talk about conflict like it’s this terrible thing,” Mallon said in an interview. “Is it that they’re afraid of [conflict], or are they lacking in experience? Probably a little bit of both.” 

Seminars and classes like “Adulting 101” are becoming more common on college campuses. Though ranging in style and substance — from one-offs on handling stress to full-semester psychology courses on how to be happy — more universities are offering help to students struggling with the stresses of everyday life and mental health challenges like anxiety and depression.

But a growing body of evidence is beginning to suggest that the problems of “adulting” and mental health in college students may be rooted, at least in part, in modern childhood. Research shows that young people are lacking in emotional resilience and independence compared to previous generations. The problem has been growing in tandem with rising rates of anxiety and depression, perhaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and has left colleges scrambling to help and adapt.

“Some parents have been parenting differently, they have this value of success at all costs,” said Dori Hutchinson, executive director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University. “I like to describe it as some kids are growing up developmentally delayed, today’s 18-year-olds are like 12-year-olds from a decade ago. They have very little tolerance for conflict and discomfort, and COVID just exposed it.” 

How modern childhood changed, and changed mental health

Research shows that young people who arrive on campus with healthy amounts of resilience and independence do better both academically and emotionally, but today more students of all backgrounds are arriving on campus with significantly less experience in dealing with life’s ups and downs. Many even see normal adult activities as risky or dangerous.

In a new study currently under review, Georgetown University psychologist Yulia Chentsova Dutton looked at whether American college students’ threshold for what is considered risky was comparable to their global peers. Chentsova Dutton and her team interviewed students from Turkey, Russia, Canada and the United States, asking them to describe a risky or dangerous experience they had in the last month. Both Turkish and Russian students described witnessing events that involved actual risk: violent fights on public transportation; hazardous driving conditions caused by drunk drivers; women being aggressively followed on the street. 

But American students were far more likely to cite as dangerous things that most adults do every day, like being alone outside or riding alone in an Uber.

The American students’ risk threshold was comparatively “quite low,” according to Chentsova Dutton. Students who reported they gained independence later in childhood — going to the grocery store or riding public transportation alone, for example — viewed their university campus as more dangerous; those same students also had fewer positive emotions when describing risky situations. 

Chentsova Dutton hypothesizes that when students have fewer opportunities to practice autonomy, they have less faith in themselves that they can figure out a risky situation. “My suspicion is that low autonomy seems to translate into low efficacy,” she said. “Low efficacy and a combination of stress is associated with distress,” like anxiety and depression.

In recent years, other psychologists have made similar associations. Author and New York University ethical leadership professor Jonathan Haidt has used Nassim Taleb’s theory of anti-fragility to explain how kids’ social and emotional systems act much like our bones and immune systems: Within reason, testing and stressing them doesn’t break them but makes them stronger. But, Haidt and first amendment advocate Greg Lukianoff have argued in their writing, a strong culture of “safetyism” which prizes the safety of children above all else, has prevented young people from putting stress on the bones, so to speak, so “such children are likely to suffer more when exposed later to other unpleasant but ordinary life events.” 

Psychologists have directly connected a lack of resilience and independence to the growth of mental health problems and psychiatric disorders in young adults and say that short cycles of stress or conflict are not only not harmful, they are essential to human development. But modern childhood, for a variety of reasons, provides few opportunities for kids to practice those skills. 

While it’s hard to point to a single cause, experts say a confluence of factors — including more time spent on smartphones and social media, less time for free play, a culture that prizes safety at the expense of building other characteristics, a fear of child kidnapping, and more adult-directed activities — together have created a culture that keeps kids far away from the kinds of experiences that build resilience.

Chentsova Dutton said America has an international reputation for prizing autonomy, but her study opened her eyes to a more complicated picture. American parents tend to be overprotective when children are young, acting as if kids are going to live at home for a long time, like parents do in Italy. Yet they also expect children to live away from home fairly early for college, like families do in Germany. The result is that American kids end up with drastically fewer years navigating real life than they do in other countries that start much earlier. 

“We parent like we are in Italy, then send kids away like we are in Germany,” Chentsova Dutton said with a laugh. “Those things don’t match.”

A movement hopes to change the culture

Seventeen-year-old Megan Miller, a senior at Hudson High School in Hudson, Ohio, recently drove her two siblings, ages 15 and 12, to Cedar Point Amusement Park for an evening of fun. Miller was nervous. She’d never driven an hour and a half away from home by herself before, especially in the dark — but she had to do it; it was homework for school. 

The assignment was to try something she’d never done before without her parents’, or anyone else’s, help. Other students figured out how to put air in their tires, cooked a meal for their family from start to finish and drove on the interstate. The point, Miller’s teacher Martin Bach said, was to give these young adults — many of whom would be living away from home in less than a year — experience with trying, failing and figuring something out on their own. 

“I was seeing that student stress and anxiety levels were already bad, then COVID supercharged it,” Bach said. But a pattern of parents “swooping in to solve problems that kids could easily solve on their own” made Bach decide to create the unit on resilience and independence. “In my head I’m thinking, these kids are going off to college, how are they going to cope?”

Bach got the idea for the “do something new on your own” assignment from Let Grow, a national nonprofit promoting greater childhood independence. Let Grow offers free curriculum, aimed mostly at elementary and middle school students, that feels like it’s giving 21st century childhood a hard reset — like “play club,” in which children are allowed to play on school playgrounds without adult interference, and the “think for yourself essay contest.” 

Let Grow is part of a growing movement of psychologists, therapists and educators advocating for evidence-based practices to help kids gain more independence and improve mental health. Let Grow’s co-founder, Lenore Skenazy, said that after traveling for years speaking to parent and school groups about the problem of shrinking childhood independence, she decided that families needed more than a lecture. “The audience would nod along, everybody gets it. But they wouldn’t let their own kids do it,” she said. Skenazy began to understand that the anxiety around child safety was not necessarily parents’ fault — the culture surrounding families almost fetishized child danger. Many parents felt they would be judged — or arrested — if they let their child walk to the park by themselves, or walk to the store. 

Skenazy moved the organization toward behavior and policy change to address the cultural issues. Along with the independence curriculum for schools, Let Grow has helped four states enact “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws aimed at protecting parents from neglect charges. Let Grow also speaks directly to parents and teachers about letting kids try things by themselves — and being surprised by what their kids are able to do. 

Like Megan Miller, whose trip to Cedar Point was thrilling yet also had bumps along the way. They got a little lost inside the park, and the siblings had a disagreement over which roller coasters to ride. On the way there, even with navigation on her phone, she took a wrong turn and ended up on an unfamiliar road. But that road wound alongside scenic Lake Erie, which she’d never been on. “It ended up being this beautiful drive that I will definitely do every single time,” Miller said. 

Since the trip, Miller’s parents have noticed a change, she said. “I find that I’m much more comfortable driving on highways and for long periods of time. My parents know now that I can do it, which helps a lot.” 

A road forward

More researchers, psychologists and educators are looking to find more ways to incorporate independence skills into kids’ daily lives. 

Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz, a professor at Long Island University-Post, began noticing a few years ago that some of his young patients, mostly children being treated for anxiety, would “fold very quickly” at the first sign of adversity. Ortiz uses what he calls the “four Ds” to explain what was happening: Today’s kids experienced less “discomfort, distress, disappointment and danger” than previous generations did, because their parents, who have the best intentions, deprive them of these opportunities. He began to wonder whether kids who didn’t get much of the four Ds were missing an important opportunity to be uncomfortable and then persist — and whether they might help clinically anxious children. 

Beginning last year, Ortiz began a pilot treatment program for childhood clinical anxiety that is based on independence and “getting parents out of their hair.”

“This is not a traditional anxiety treatment,” he said. “My approach is something like: So you’re afraid of the dark? Go to the deli and buy me some salami.” A lot of anxiety is based in fear of the unknown, so the treatment involves having an experience full of uncertainty, like riding the subway alone or going to the grocery alone. If the child can tolerate the discomfort in that situation, Ortiz hypothesized that those lessons might translate to whatever is causing the child anxiety.

Early results are promising: the independence exercises have been successful in quelling anxiety for some children. “The new approach that I have developed is for middle school kids,” he said. “So by the time they’re college students, they’ve gotten a lot more practice with those four Ds.” 

Other groups help build resilience in students in academic settings, like the Resilience Builder Program, which aims to help students think more flexibly, be proactive in the face of challenges and learn optimistic thinking. The program’s creator, Mary Alvord, said the protective factors taught to middle schoolers are based on decades of research on childhood resilience. “It’s about being proactive and not feeling like you’re a victim, how you can control some things, but you can’t control everything,” she said. “How can you make the best of it, and if you can’t — how do you ask for help?” 

Experts say independence and autonomy are best formed and tested in childhood, but it’s never too late to begin. At the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, Hutchinson and her team help college students diagnosed with mental illness continue their education and reach their goals, and that often begins with building their resilience and independence skills. The center has developed a curriculum that is focused not just on students, but parents and faculty as well. 

“Families are a player at the table,” Hutchinson said. Parents benefit from coaching that shows them how to support their student without “doing for” them. Parents sometimes don’t understand that protecting their child from failure and difficulty can be an obstacle to growth. 

“When we are controlling a young adult’s experiences, and they go without that full range of emotional experience,” said the center’s Director for Strategic Initiatives Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk, “we’re actually curbing people’s opportunities to live full lives, and have the full range of human experience.”

==

Fredsskadade is a Swedish word meaning "injured by peace."

What would have been a fascinating follow-up would be to have the Canadian and US participants read the answers of the Turkish and Russian participants. And vice versa.

The fact that the peaceful, first world societies have affirmed and reinforced the anxiety in their kids - the psychological equivlent of foot-binding, seemingly because there are fewer legitimate threats than at any time in history - is something these societies will need to reckon with.

[baby-xemnas]

i love how law disappears completely from the frame from the bepo impact

[twyrineslut]

do u understand

[uhhh-ghouls007]

WILDLY IMPORTANT IMAGE FOR MYSELF AND MYSELF ONLY PROBABLY

[samijey]

two more instances of Jey checking on Sami after this week's show 🥺

[binah-beloved]

I would cry a lot with Distorted Binah, because I would feel like it was my fault, because of my weakness she became distorted. I would give her all the love in the world while in blame, and if any workshop tried to hurt my giant toucan (affectionate nickname), I would have to deal with all my combat pages, and the distortion pages

she'll watch you cry and try to comfort you, tucking you close to her feathers. your love isn't weakness, your love is what gives her strength. it's why her mind isn't as far gone as it could be, why she's mostly at peace with her distorted form, why she was able to recognize you in the first place. it seems you need a day off, so she sweeps a tattered wing overtop of your body and settles in next to you, the soft hums she lets out reminiscent of her voice when she was still human

she doesn't regret loving you, not in the slightest. she'd rather love and distort than to never love at all

[magicalgrimm]

I still really need to know why PEACE just let heed brain wash a whole city and did nothing about except save her from a for sure deadly beating.

They really must be doing everything that they can to make sure they’re not the ones responsible for that because I could imagine the damages to that city and its people are out of this world. All to catch some villains (probably, that’s my theory).

Why are they keeping her anyway? Are they rehabilitating her? Are they trying to set her up to go back to the normal world by wiping her memory or something like that? Does she have family who work for peace? why did they save her??

I really gotta fixate on something else for a while. Villainous is hurting my brain. and my heart.

[fearandhatred]

i always have to have something wrong with me at all times and there are always about fifteen different factors that could have caused that Something Wrong With Me so i can never fix it

[denkies]

i am so afraid that the target over his heart is foreshadowing

[kosovareasllani9]

I just find it hilarious that it's Kosse in the fight. Not Magda or Bjorn or Frido even but friends with almost everyone Kosovare Asllani.. like I know she's a hot head but she's always so composed and collected and polite to everyone.... Dare I say I'm kinda proud?? Go get em' you little bubble wrap butterfly!

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

I come for an ask about this brainrot. *offers you a box* wherein Foul Legacy and Childe exist separately. But this time human Childe turned into Foxtaglia after he drinks one of your potions.

The reader is an alchemist, much like Albedo - actually is Albedo's competition. The reader is the best student alchemist in Sumeru, just one paper shy from graduation. The reader traveled to Liyue to study about the Adepti (specifically their transformation powers in historical text) and met Childe. The pair hit it off. On one occasion, Childe transformed to Foul Legacy and the reader witnessed this. Given the inquisitive nature of the reader's personality, questions were bound to be asked. Soon, the reader gets a breakthrough: a potion to allow the reader to transform for a brief period of time. A batch of antidote was even prepared in case things get messy.

On the day of the experiment, the reader was waiting for Childe to finish prepping for work. He had donned his signature jacket and fixed the red mask on the side of his head. Upon noticing the reader's barely concealed excitement, he sat beside the reader. The reader then explains that today was the day for the potion trial. *insert slew of intellectual and passionate explanation* Childe nods affectionately, knowing how smart his s/o was. He suddenly felt parched and reached for the glass of water on the table and gulped it all.

"Hmm? Why did you stop, love? I was listening-"

He turned to you and came face to face with your surprised face.

"Ajax! You drank the potion!"

"what potion? That was just wa-" he felt heat in ripping through his limbs. "i feel weird." He looked back at you with a stunned, worried expression.

The force of the transformation made him lose balance for a second, his arms accidentally topping over the batch of antidote you made. Just as his body was falling over - it turned into a puff of clouds - and out emerged a fox (Foxtaglia) midair. He leaped gracefully onto the chair, slowly looked over himself while going in a circle. A whining sound came out of him. Then he jumped into your arms, face burying against your neck.

Your hand came to settle on his head and you just began stroking him. A little giggle escaped you at his current state of undeniable cuteness.

"Jax, you didn't have to take the potion for me-"

Foxtaglia whined at your teasing.

"But you're too adorable right now."

You picked him up and looked at his furry face. You kissed his cheek softly.

"Still handsome whatever form you take. I wonder if you could use Foul Legacy in this state. That would make for a great research material but unfortunate I can't write about it."

A small yip came from him and his fur began puffing up as he prepared to turn Foul Legacy.

-Macchiato

*EATS THIS IN ONE BITE* Macchiato, you always give me such interesting brainrot <33 and i have just the idea for this one :))

there's another puff of clouds- much larger this time- and Foxtaglia yelps in surprise and leaps back into your arms, unchanged except for his fur poofed up in fear. you blink in confusion but pat his head nonetheless, wondering what in the world could've shaken him in so badly in those few seconds before turning your attention back to the cloud of smoke

the dust settles and reveals a very confused, very real Foul Legacy, and suddenly Foxtaglia's reactions makes perfect sense because if you weren't so desensitized to shock due to some the stuff that happens regularly at the Akademiya, you would've yelped too. but at the moment, it seems that Foul Legacy is more scared of the situation than you are, and you manage to slowly calm him down with gentle shushes and whispers. he's not used to being apart from Childe for very long, but the potion unfortunately made Childe's current body unable to bear the stress of the transformation, so now Foul Legacy's stuck outside for who knows how long

at least you're here, though, and Foul Legacy's quick to curl up beside you, scrunching his legs in to seem smaller and nudging your hand until you start petting him. your other hand continues to rub between Foxtaglia's ears, who's seemingly gotten over his initial scare and is now intensely staring Foul Legacy down. Foul Legacy lets out a whimper and hides his face behind your shoulder, and you gently flick one of Foxtaglia's ears with a small frown

"Behave yourself, he's more scared than you are"

Foxtaglia huffs, curling into a fluffy ball to pout, and you scoop him off your shoulder and set him down, intent on grabbing the antidote, ignoring the chorus of squeaks and whimpers from Foxtaglia and Foul Legacy. you turn back and beckon Foxtaglia onto your lap, tilting his fuzzy head back so he swallows the probably nasty-tasting antidote. with a third puff of clouds Childe is sitting on your lap, human again, and wraps his arms around your neck with a happy hum now that the issue is finally resolved. it was interesting, but let's never do that again, yeah? the potions tasted truly revolting. but you clear your throat and poke him awake, your other hand stretched to your side, and Childe turns to see your fingers buried in Foul Legacy's hair, the Abyssal beast melting and purring under your touch

Foul Legacy... didn't return to Childe when he turned back into a human. and neither of you are sure if he even can

[ventingtoyouuu]

i am genuinely at a loss for words. israel just bombed a hospital. let that sink in. A HOSPITAL. my heart has been breaking more than ever these last few weeks for the horrific loss of life that the Palestinians are facing. shame on the western world and shame on anyone who continues to try and justify these blatant acts of bloodshed and terrorism committed against the Palestinians at the hands of their oppressors. the entire world has failed the people of Palestine. 🇵🇸💔

[soupnoodle]

j&w swap!au is the funniest thing ever and you are ready for this conversation

[blueiskewl]

Ukrainian heroes in the Kherson region rescue a severely injured dog that was left for dead on the roadside by Russian terrorists. Now the four-legged friend is recovering and helping our military to defend the Motherland.

We are saving every Ukrainian. Regardless of who they are - a person or an animal.

No one will be left behind!

Video by Vladyslav Voloshyn.

[squisheebugdoodles]

i am going to wither and explode if i have to not be able to draw much longer i am losing my mind

[libraryspectre]

Having to let people help me is gonna be my villain origin story