“The first thing to make sure of is that she’s getting eight hours of sleep. At least. The Zoloft only works if you’re getting the right amount of sleep.”
These were the words my pediatrician said to my parents after I was prescribed antidepressants for the first time.
It was 2014, and I was 16, just starting my junior year of high school. It was the first time I saw a mental health professional. I had suffered from a variety of mental and emotional health issues, including insomnia, anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I wasn’t the only one with these problems, either. In fact, according to the Utah Department of Health, there were significant increases in adolescents feeling sad or hopeless, contemplating and attempting suicide, from 2013-2017. As of 2021, according to Mental Health America, the number of teenagers who had a major depressive episode increased by 206,000 since 2020.
And when it comes to sleep, according to the CDC, 72.7% of high school students are not getting the amount they need, particularly on school nights.
Dealing with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and suicide ideation is something that members of my generation bond over, even make jokes about. Look up “Gen Z memes” and you’ll be inundated with jokes about hating our lives, a sense of impending doom and a death wish. Gen Z humor is, in a word, obsidian.
We are the generation that, in addition to being raised on dystopian stories like “The Hunger Games,” have lived through a pandemic, an ongoing climate change crisis, the election of a demagogue and constant fear of school shootings. Add onto all of that a developing brain that isn’t getting the sleep it needs, and how can we not expect mass mental health problems?
Thankfully, helping teenagers with their mental health problems doesn’t have to be as complicated as solving climate change or preventing fascism. As I learned from my pediatrician seven years ago, the answer may be as simple as prioritizing sleep for our teenagers.
People have attributed the mental health problems young people face to everything from social media and cell phones to “just being a teenager.” But why do school start times never get brought up? Why is it that we’ve all accepted without question the notion that being a teenager must be synonymous with suffering?
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, we identified the most vulnerable groups and made necessary changes to protect them. Shouldn’t we do the same for teenagers, who, when it comes to mental health problems, are decidedly the most vulnerable group?
There are many strategies that can be used to help teenagers get the sleep they need. But one that needs to be seriously considered is later school start times. Studies have shown that schools with these later times lead to better grades from the students, as well as a higher attendance rate.
As we head into the new school year, I urge school boards across the state to follow the lead of the Logan City School District, which moved its start time to 8:45 am, and the schools of the Salt Lake City School District, which plan to move their start times back by an hour.
Consider the improvement in attendance, academic performance, and overall mental health of high schoolers that has been shown to occur when schools start later. The cure for climate change, school shootings and a failing health care system may be distant and elusive, but, as Logan and Salt Lake have shown, the cure for lack of sleep is right at our fingertips. Let’s take it.
Rachel Barnes
Rachel Barnes, Provo, is a student at Brigham Young University, majoring in ancient near eastern studies and scheduled to graduate April 2022. I run an Instagram page called sleepforteensprovo, which aims to spread awareness about the importance of sleep in preventing various mental health problems and encourage later school start times.
