REFLECTION
This articles addresses the mental health crisis on college campuses and suggests innovative ways schools can help solve the problem. It is written by Hara Marano, Editor for Psychology Today.
The schools themselves--or more typically, a small cadre of concerned people on each campus--create the solutions, and in some unique way each of them seeks to stem the tide of disaffection and disconnection through fully engaging students inside the classroom and out. Whatever the program, one of the most effective tools is for students to actively reflect on their experience in it and write about it. Taking time for reflection seems to be a fairly novel experience for so many young people, which makes one wonder whether it doesn't play some sort of causative role in their mental health problems.
PROCESSING EXPERIENCE
You can't have an identity unless you engage in reflection. Reflection allows you to take time to process experience. This is incredibly important for detoxifying troubling or negative experience; reflection allows you to figure out what about the situation is so unpleasant, t0 understand why, and to come up with possible ways of dealing more effectively with similar or related experiences in the future. A person might realize they can become better equipped personally to deal with such situations in the future; perhaps there is a need to bolster certain skills. Or, on reflection, one might come to recognize ways to avoid similar situations in the future, or to turn them around. Reflection is not a passive occupation; it allows us to figure out more effective ways of being who and what we want in the world.
A HOSTILE CULTURE
Important as it is, the habit of reflection is terribly hard for youngpeople to develop on their own; they have to be specifically encouraged to do it and guided into it by those close to them. The entire culture is rigged against reflection, although you and I alike know that we wouldn't be able to maintain our sanity without it. For most of us, the world is full of distractions, and it can take an almost superhuman effort to avoid them. The kind of self-control that young people need to steer their own course doesn't come all at once. From television to video games to cell phones information on the internet--to the young almost anything looks more exciting than time for reflection. And yet, reflection confers one thing we know is associated with mental health--the sense that one is driving one's life, not being driven by forces outside of one's control. and the whole world of play, connection, and
WE'RE ALL RESPONSIBLE
Of course, for some people, reflection spins out of control and turns into rumination, and that sends one rapidly spiraling downward into depression. But that doesn't seem to be the problem of many young people, who seem to have the opposite problem. Their frenetic lives, filled with activities and distractions, seem to leave them no time at all for reflection. Perhaps all of us who are concerned with mental health and good habits of the mind have a role to play here. We can encourage reflection in our children (and grandchildren), not as punishment (Go to your room and think of five reasons why you should be thankful for all you have). We can encourage reflection as a passport to understanding,oneself and possibly everything else.