Various factors trigger depression in young people. As a parent, guardian or someone working with young people, we have the responsibility to tap into their feelings more than just occasionally. Antidepressants and professional help might be the primary treatments but early intervention into the lives of the vulnerable can prevent irreparable damage. Keeping an eye on changing behaviors and, talking and discussing issues can be the best foot forward before they completely shut us out.
Given the current condition of lock-down and the pandemic playing havoc in peoples lives, all age groups, especially our younger people who are more prone to depression than the older cohort, seem to be affected the most.
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Reading & Lock-Down
Among many practices that have proven to reduce anxiety and depression among young people during COVID-19, reading is hands down the go-to practice to implement.
Reading books is like therapy irrespective of the form of writing.
Non-Fiction & Learning
In this age, we have heaps of non-fiction literature out there. Philosophy, Marketing, Productivity, Biographies, Self-help, Personal-development etc you name it. We learn heaps from these sources. They are not necessarily boring anymore. Writers of non-fiction genres have put in a lot of effort mostly in the last decade or so to make them more and more interesting and engaging for readers.
There is no doubt that reading can change the whole scheme of our thinking.
I want to be an entrepreneur one day, and I have been intentionally reading books… non-fiction books for beginners like myself.
But why is that when we want to learn, we always turn to non-fiction?
Why is that we don’t expect fiction to fulfil learning and development?
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Fiction as a source of learning and preventing mental instability among our young people
Fiction has a unique power of its own. It can tap into peoples’ creativity. According to Collins Dictionary, ‘fiction refers to books and stories about imaginary people and events, rather than books about real people or events’.
Reading fiction develops a sensitivity, tolerance and understanding towards other people.
This genre has this unique ability to transport the reader to another world, enabling the reader to disengage himself/herself from their cognitive ability for the moment to function optimally later.
Humans are being of complex emotions and reading fiction helps readers to better understand these.
There have also been studies that showed about a 32% lower rate of mental decline compared to peers.
On the same lines, Sci-Fi is considered to produce resilience and improve a young person’s critical thinking.
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Fiction as a lie that pulls young and vulnerable minds away from the reality of this world
On the other hand, a study done in 2017 found that when readers showed lower empathy for characters in a science fiction novel when they found words like “airlock” and “antigravity”.
Even though mindset has evolved over the last decade, there is still a stigma that associates with science fiction readers as geeks- readers who can only deal with human predicaments if they were according to what was in the books and hence cannot face real-life situations.
Most storybooks are nothing but lies but honest lies. — Mac Bernett
In his TED talk, ‘Why a good book is a secret door’, Bernett gives an example of one of his books about a whale. Inside the book’s jacket, there is an address where kids can write to have their own whales shipped to them if they wanted to have them as a pet. Of course, they don’t send them real whales but a letter saying due to some customs issue they cannot send the whale to them but give a phone number where they can talk to their whale. When kids call, on the other end of the phone is just whale sounds etc.
This sounds very cute.
When my four-year-old does pretend car races with his dinky cars, he looks very cute. But I start getting worried after a while and jump into just to re-assure that he knows that this is all a pretend play, in reality, if the car goes loopty-loop, it will end up in a very bad crash and terribly hurt the driver. And my explanation goes on to road safety rules and so on.
Difference between fiction and reality and a whole lot of unanswered questions in between
If someone told me that eating all the doughnuts in the world will not make me fat, I am qued for a huge disappointment.
Fiction can talk about reality but it is still not real.
Science Fiction can talk about real emotions and characters in different settings but it is still not real (at least not yet).
Someone with a raw understanding about life is made to live and believe in a fictitious world, how do you think this would pan out for their mental health in the long run?
Would these pretend-worlds not leave them more bitter when they find out that they do not exist or they do not work that way in the same way in reality.?
How would they react to a totally new set of rules and understanding? Won’t they be torn apart in two worlds?
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Conclusion
Pillow fortresses, chasing each other as monsters, pretend warriors dress ups and tea parties…
It is quite astonishing how creative young people can be. It is not hard for them to quickly think out of the box. For them, there is no box… It is only the world that creates the box for them as they grow.
As parents and care-givers, it boils down to us to nurture and not muzzle their creativity but help them find refuge when they need to in stories for some time but not necessarily letting them rely on stories to help them cope.
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Previously published on “Change Becomes You”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: Nicole Wolf on Unsplash