Doctor: What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
Cecilia: Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl
For many, adolescence recalls a bleak era we would prefer to bury in our subconscious, vowing to forget. My childhood was a fog of loneliness but also of great fantasy. Once I reached puberty and pulled back the curtain on my active imagination revealing the harsh realities of Jr. high I began to fall apart in many ways.
According to lectures by Stephen Hinshaw of the department of psychology at UC Berkley, until the age of 11 boys are much more apt to fall into a depression than girls. Once kids reach the tender age of 11 or 12, something happens. Girls quickly spiral ahead of boys in the realm of depression, eating disorders and anxiety. From the age of 16 on, girls have 2 to 2.5 times more chance of having depression than boys, Hinshaw reports. Teen suicide has been on the rise since the 1950′s, but in the past decade these numbers began to rapidly rise. In just two years, from 2003-2005 the suicide rate for teenage girls went up 76%.
At puberty the body begins intensely secreting hormones, giving a rush of up to 10,000 times more hormones to the body than before. .According to Hinshaw these hormones may be activating a “depression gene” in girls, but something is switching this depression gene on earlier and earlier. Hinshaw speculates that perhaps it is something environmental (since girls’ genes don’t change dramatically over the course of a few years). Hinshaw concludes that because of this environmental change, all girls are more at risk for depression.
Jr. high is a time of upheaval. As a girl at this point in your life you are expected to adhere to feminine roles more than ever before, which traditionally mean being caring, nurturing and gentle. But recently being all girl also means being overtly sexual and physically attractive to a point of unattainable “perfection.”
According to the report of the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, during Jr. high girls begin policing each other for conformance and hotness and boys begin objectifying and harassing girls. All the while girls are also now expected to fill the traditionally male roles of being competitive and cerebral, too. You are expected to go for that scholarship, go to college, be athletic, look hot and act feminine while doing all of it.
The girls coming of age in this decade were raised in the “Girl Power”, “You can do Anything” 1990′s but matured in a time of backlash. 2003-2005 saw a blanketing of anti-role-models: Paris, Nicole, Britney, Lindsay, Disnified tanorexia. During this time of heavy media scrutiny over the bodies of young women it’s no surprise that eating disorders in girls would be on the rise.
There is a switch in popular music also, the decade before this was a time of powerful women artists: riot grrls, songstresses like Tori or Fiona, the lillith ladies and even the Spice Girls. But suddenly these faces disappeared and replacing them were the bodies of hyper-sexualized over-glossed popstars. During 2003-2005 eighteen covers of Rolling Stone magazine featured women (the likes of Britney, Jessica, Beyonce and Gwen). Of those eighteen covers, seventeen were sexualized, featuring the women in anything that showed lots of airbrushed skin. These are the models of femininity for young girls to study and emulate; these images are hard for a grown woman to process, let alone a younger girl whose body and sense of self is still being formed.
I think the clue to much of this problem lies not in the contradictory messages from the culture, not in the anti-woman propaganda but in the home lives of these girls. One thing that happened from 2003-2005 that may account for a percentage of the suicide increase is that anti-depressants were given a warning label that included specific rare side effects. While this may not have affected the prescriptions of a lot of pre-pubescent girls, it may have done so indirectly by affecting parents going off their meds.
According to Hinshaw, when a parent is depressed or is repressing emotions the child is often conditioned to feel and manage the parent’s feelings for them. According to Hinshaw, when puberty hits these girls they take on excessive guilt, rumination and hyper-worrying (negative thought patterns which are symptomatic of depression). These girls are already more at risk for depression because their mothers suffer depression.
I remember how hopeless I felt at 13. I remember self loathing and the feeling of imprisonment.
Like me, have you tried to bury your past because it is too hard to handle? Can you for a moment, imagine that tortured adolescent inside yourself? Building the bridge to this part of yourself is the first step in helping those that are held captive in the present.
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5 Comments
Depression gene? what evolutionary purpose would that serve?
more likely a girl’s growing sexuality triggers the unconcious shame of being molested or over-sexualised early on in life – which the majority of girls [and boys] are.
The women musicians of the 90′s were over-sexualised as well – they just showed it in a different way… Britney dancing around half naked and Kathleen scrawling “incest” across her chest are the same symptom to me.
In the 90′s girls were more open and angry about it. Kathleen, Tori, and Fiona all have songs about molestation [I think Tori even set up a hotline for it?]
2003 and 2005, interestingly enough, were the times I was living in homes for ‘wayward’ teens, and every other girl in those wards either claimed to have been sexually attacked at some point, or had vague feelings that they had been. I was one of the “vague feeling” girls and I had it confirmed by my mother when I was 17.
I believe the media sexualization of girls is a symptom, not the problem. When adults stop spanking/molesting/raping their little girls you won’t see things like thongs for 8 year olds anymore.
I agree that the 90′s women musicians were also sexualized, but open about how it was fucked up more as though they were trying to reclaim their sexuality, owning it. I also agree that there is a molestation aspect to the sexualization…and that sexualization of little girls could not survive without that. What I am wondering however is what happened in 2003-2005 that brought this to the mainstream, to the point of stores actually selling kid sized thongs. I’m not sure how the parenting changed in those years, I don’t have any statistics on it. Any ideas?
there are two extremes when it comes to sexually shamed women.. they either cover themselves up – think how it was considered shameful for women to even show their ankles only about a century ago – or they wear clothes that are too revealing – your average pop star these days… they are two sides of the same coin.. one of them is just more in demand now.
when i was a teenager i wore a lot of baggy and ill-fitting clothes to hide my body, i now see that as connected to the abuse i suffered.
A depression gene would refer to the allele passed on by the parents that would represent the vulnerability for depression. Whether an allele manifests itself is dependent on many factors including stress from environment, hormones, and/or trauma. The genetic component for depression is well established through hereditary, twin studies and others.
76%?! This is such a startling and sad statistic.
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