25 years ago, the book Reviving Ophelia started a national discussion about young women and mental health. How does it hold up today?
Are The Kids Alright? 25 years ago, the book Reviving Ophelia started a national discussion about young women and mental health. Here, the author's daughter examines what has changed for teens since then, and recalls what it was like to be the original “Ophelia”
Let me provide some context. Named after Ophelia—Hamlet’s spurned lover who became so confused as she tried to please both her father and paramour that she eventually drowned in a stream—my mother’s book was a call to arms for parents and professionals working with adolescent girls.
The complete cultural saturation of devices has enormous—and largely unstudied—implications for all of us, but especially for adolescent girls, who, as the largest users of social media, spend an average of six to nine hours a day online. This impacts all aspects of their development—cognitive, emotional, physical, sexual, and maturational. We are, I believe, experimenting with an entire generation, and we don’t yet know how this experiment will play out.
Interestingly, girls themselves are aware of the drawbacks of social media—in fact, some seem almost wistful for the “olden days” before SnapChat and Tik Tok. In our focus groups, many girls could articulate that they struggle with social media but said, in the same breath, that they couldn’t live without it. “When you’re a kid, you’re not self-conscious about what you look like when you are doing things,” an interviewee named Aspen tells me.
The 1980s and ’90s were the zenith of the “dysfunctional family” model of therapy, in which parents were blamed for any and all unhappiness their children experienced. Today’s girls still argue with their parents in middle school—and I would argue that’s developmentally appropriate—but by high school they report closeness with their fathers and often say their mothers are their best friends.
“When my friends are depressed, I’m the person they call,” a girl named Olivia tells us. “It’s terrifying. I’ve put suicide prevention apps on so many people’s phones.”
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