Writing Helps People With Mental Illness January 22, 2007

Teenagers are often seen temperamental, self-centered, and unstable beings. A lot of people just think it is a “phase” that kids go through. Most high school kids are not in the “real world” yet, so how can they have “real problems?” Well, they do. It is stressful being in high school. Teens have to worry about grades, deadlines, extra-curricular activities, college applications, drugs, sex, alcohol, unwanted pregnancies, family problems, and believe it or not, where they sit in cafeteria. The truth is for a lot of kids this “moodiness” is not just a phase and they aren’t just being difficult. A lot of teens have real problems that need real help.

A website called “About Teen Depression” offers some staggering statistics:

The statistics on teen depression are sobering. Studies indicate that one in five children have some sort of mental, behavioral, or emotional problem, and that one in ten may have a serious emotional problem. Among adolescents, one in eight may suffer from depression. Of all these children and teens struggling with emotional and behavioral problems, a mere 30% receive any sort of intervention or treatment. The other 70% simply struggle through the pain of mental illness or emotional turmoil, doing their best to make it to adulthood.

So, where can these kids go to get help? How about their high school English class? Ron Hilton wrote an atricle in the Democrat and Chronicle telling about his experience as a creative writing teacher. He has a creative writing class that is specifically for people dealing with mental illnesses and alcoholism.

He writes:

For some time I have been teaching creative writing to people in recovery from mental illness and/or addiction. My current students are clients of the Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Treatment and Employment Service, a program   of Catholic Family Center. I am especially pleased to be working with them because I, too, am recovering from mental illness. I know firsthand their daily turmoil of meeting symptoms head on. Thus, I am inspired by their valiant struggle on dual fronts: to express themselves in prose or poetry and to battle mental illness.Often they tell me that writing provides them a creative outlet, that they (like many professional writers) learn to live in the minds and hearts of their characters. One of my students recently observed that he never feels so well as when he is writing.

How great! All schools should try to incorporate a creative writing class, or at least a creative writing unit into an existing English class. It would benefit the students both academically and mentally. They could write about the problems they don’t feel comfortable talking about. They can play out situations and feeling in their writing, that they can’t in real life. They can channel their frustration in a productive way.

Writing acts as a release. I know in my life I have problems and struggles that I don’t feel comfortable talking about, so I write. Even writing one page when I am upset can make a difference. It gives me a chance to sort out my life and make sense of everything, and in the end I have a poem, or a story that I am proud of. Why not give every student the chance to experience this “free” therapy?

Of course having a creative writing class is not going to solve every students’s problems, but it is better than doing nothing at all.  For more information visit the article “Finding hope and healing in writing poetry, prose”

Full Article   

and check out the website “About Teen Depression”  

About Teen DepressionHilton, Ron. “Finding Hope and Healing in Poetry, Prose.” Democrat and Chronicle, 11 January 2007.