Ninna Ragasa had just turned 24 when doctors found a mass in her left brain. Further imaging revealed Ragasa had an arteriovenous Malformation. This is a congenital disorder that causes blood vessels to clog and prevents oxygen from reaching the brain.
Doctors recommended that the mass be removed to prevent it from rupturing, which could prove fatal. Ragasa is a Pratt Institute graduate student in interior design. She was concerned that brain surgery might affect her mobility and hinder her career goals.
“Being a designer came easily to me,” says Ragasa, who is a friend of mine.
However, the surgery went well and Ragasa resumed her life at Pratt. Ragasa fell about a year later. Ragasa blamed her hard-work and hard-partying lifestyle, but she soon stopped drinking. She kept falling. She changed from spike heels to chunky boots, then to flip-flops. Nothing worked. One day Ragasa fell getting off the subway and had to crawl to her mother’s house.
Scans revealed that Ragasa’s brain had swelled after the procedure, causing her to gradually lose mobility along the right side of her body. Ragasa was unable to handle the physical demands that art students face, including building models and drawing. She quit school and got a job with medical insurance that would pay for her physical therapy. She says she felt completely lost.
We all experience life’s challenges at one point or another. Ragasa can be sick or we may lose a close friend. Research shows that the age at which calamity strikes has a significant impact on our responses to it. Young adults are especially vulnerable to being lost or confused. That’s partially because when the rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood are delayed or lost, young adults can feel unmoored and increasingly uncertain about the future — a point driven home by this cohort’s plummeting well-being during the ongoing pandemic.
Research has not always considered young adulthood to be significantly different from other years. But it’s now well established that the human brain matures well into one’s 20s (SN: 5/22/19). And social and economic changes in recent generations mean that the once linear path from living in one’s parents’ home to moving out and starting one’s own family has elongated and become considerably more jagged. For years, this has been true Climate ChangeThis has added to the already fraught mix of uncertainty (SN: 8/18/21). The pandemic didn’t cause the mental crisis among young adults; it merely accelerated existing trends.
The ages 18-25 represent a period of intense exploration in love, work, and the worldview. This age group should be considered as a unique developmental periodJeffrey Arnett, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Ma. wrote that a person can be a child or an adult. He did this in a seminal 2000 paper. American Psychologist. “Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.”
The pandemic has forced us to ask: What happens when that “scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities” gets stalled or even curtailed?
All evidence suggests that the consequences for young adults could prove to be devastating. Instead of maturing, this group’s personalities have become More juvenile, I reported last month (SN: 9/28/22). People under 30 years old are generally less conscientious and less willing to compromise, and they tend to be more neurotic. Young adults report that they are more conscientious than older adults. higher levelsSymptoms of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that were experienced during the pandemic.
An analysis of approximately 2,600 U.S. adults in January 2022 revealed that this group has distorted the U curve. This controversial theory states that happiness and health are higher in later and early life, but lower in middle-age. This view is supported by Don’t despairThe badge of youth, once reserved only for middle-aged, seems to have become the badge that identifies as a badge of youth.
“The left part of the ‘U’ has essentially completely flattened,” wrote study coauthor and Harvard University epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele in Psychology Today. “Young people … report being less happy and less healthy; having less meaning, greater struggles with character, and poor relationships; and [being] less financially stable compared to their older counterparts.”
Young adult decisions can have profound knock-on consequences. Temporarily delaying going to college at the pandemic’s onset, for instance, could become a permanent decision, thereby radically shifting the trajectory of one’s life.
Rodica Damian of University of Houston, personality psychologist, believes that some young adults will bounce back from this experience without too much difficulty. However, others may have difficulty, she says. “Sometimes when something happens during a critical development period, there is a snowball effect.”
Damian’s comment reminded me of a conversation I had more than a year ago with developmental psychologist Anthony Burrow of Cornell University. Rather presciently, shortly before the pandemic hit, Burrow had begun characterizing a phenomenon he referred to as “derailment.” Derailment, Burrow told me, refers to people’s feeling that their life has been thrown off course. People can feel lost and unable to identify themselves. Who am I anyway?
“Derailment is a subjective sense that who you were cannot be reconciled with who you are,” Burrow says. “That train was heading in one direction on those tracks, but can no longer advance on that track.”
One way to gauge derailment during the pandemic is to ask ourselves: “Am I still the same person as I was pre-pandemic?” Burrow says. “It’s a basic question with profound implications.”
Burrow and his team found that Americans who feel depressed struggle with anxiety, depression, and decreased well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.Furthermore, Feelings of derailmentDepressive symptoms can be associated with depression up to a year later.
But Burrow’s work also points to ways to get our metaphorical trains back on track. In that same study, he found that journaling — having people write a narrative that stitches together their The past and the present — can help them regain that sense of continuity and reestablish goals for the future.
Another study suggests that a more flexible approach to managing your time is better. East Asian mindsetThis could be a way to help people adjust to a life that has veered off-track. Researchers reported that Japanese who have been derailment are not affected by the same drop in wellbeing as Westerners. Journal of Happiness Studies. According to the researchers, the key difference may lie in our thinking styles. Westerners are more inclined to believe that life should follow a straight line. Japanese, however, believe that life is dynamic and full of contradictions. These detours are normal.
Ragasa, who emigrated from the Philippines to the United States as a child, can relate to that feeling. She was in her 20s when she was feeling physically and emotionally invincible. But, losing her identity left her in turmoil. She moved to Vermont eventually and had a child.
Despite this, it took her many years to understand that the old art route she was on was now gone for good. “I had to mourn it and let it go,” she says. She says she is now in the difficult process of finding a new song. “I still feel lost,” she says. “I have to figure out who I am now.”
