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Winter 2009/10 | Vol 13 No 2

Focus

The Net generation

Welcome to their world

By Lesley Young

Client: “Nobody at school likes me anymore. They say horrible things about me in front of everyone else. I was so upset I flipped out on Nagus.”
Therapist: “Who is Nagus”
Client: “Oh, he’s my BFF avatar I talk to all the time.”
Therapist: “Your what?”

If you’re over the age of say, 30, you might identify with this fictional scenario. For the record, an “avatar” is a character that can be personalized and used to interface with others online, for example, in virtual games. Given that the adolescents and teenagers you may work with have grown up immersed in the Internet, you need to understand how they operate in the cyber world – and how it may affect issues they grapple with.

For these cyber youth, what happens online is as important as what happens in their offline world. “Studies show that teenagers and young adults spend as much time on their virtual identity on places such as Facebook and MySpace as on their ‘real’ identity,” says Avrum Nadigel, a Toronto-based adolescent and family therapist. “To ignore that virtual identity in a clinical setting is a serious problem.”

Faye Mishna, interim dean at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto, agrees: “Not only do clinicians tend to underestimate [the impact of cyberspace], but most parents don’t realize the extent to which it affects their children.” The cyber world is as likely as the offline world to create situations that may trigger a predisposition to a mental health problem, exacerbate an existing one or even contribute to its development.

According to Statistics Canada, 96 per cent of Canadians age 16 to 24 went online in 2007. In the general population, 20 per cent of home Internet users reported contributing content by posting images, writing blogs or participating in discussion groups. Of these, more than 50 per cent were under 30. It’s a trend that continues to grow.

What is also growing are questions about the potential implications of the virtual world for the mental health of youth. “Their decision-making process is still being formed,” explains Dr. Alexa Bagnell, a psychiatrist at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Young people may be impulsive and unable to appreciate the extent of the consequences of their actions. Yet the online consequences can be profound, given the scale of the Internet, where young people can be shunned on Facebook or humiliated with an embarrassing online photo that hundreds of their peers can see.

But the Internet can also be a place where youth who may not have many friends can connect with people. For the average youth, research shows that offline relationships are enhanced by online connections. “It can be a place that is very supportive and positive, a place where kids can be themselves and express their own identity and be connected,” says Mishna.

The online world also poses challenges, says Nadigel. Young people without a community of positive adults in their lives may find a community of peers online who are more than happy to listen and understand where they are coming from, he says. “In that case, you may end up with the blind leading the blind.” He adds that if someone is going to act out, there are fewer barriers to engaging in bad behaviour online.

Nadigel highlights how the Internet may influence mental health development, with the caution that it remains to be seen whether or exactly how these influences play out over time.

False sense of intimacy. Nadigel is noticing a tendency among adolescents, especially young girls, to assume they know someone because they have connected online, for example, they’ve seen their photos and information on Facebook. “Often they meet a person online and have a sexual relationship with him the first time they meet in person,” he says. When it doesn’t turn out the way they expect, they are disappointed. Over time, Nadigel says this could interfere with the ability to form strong, trusting bonds with others.

Anonymity. Nadigel would like to believe that people who hide behind anonymity are benefiting most of the time (for example, a gay rural youth reaching out to others). “But I don’t think that is the case,” he says. “My hunch is that people use anonymity more often to ‘as if.’” “As if” is the clinical term for acting like someone you are not. Online anonymity allows you to create, say and do things you never would offline. The long-term impact on social and mental behaviours is not known, but Nadigel says a false sense of anonymity may lead youth to make bad judgment calls.

Voyeurism. Teenagers tend to get caught up in voyeurism more than anonymity online, says Nadigel. Everybody “knows” everybody. “The question is, how fulfilling are those relationships?” says Nadigel, who thinks the Internet will exacerbate a predisposition to narcissism in teenagers who may already be struggling with healthy relationships.

All the web’s a stage. Nadigel is always surprised at how much youth reveal about themselves online, without any thought to repercussions down the road. The Internet has enabled anyone to be a star, in so far as it presents, potentially, a worldwide audience. The result is that many young people are unwittingly putting themselves in precarious positions.

While clinicians need to keep in mind that the Internet is an integral part of many young people’s lives, Nadigel says that therapy itself, free of distractions and information overload, is a counterbalance to the rapid, anxiety-triggering universe young people are living in. Just having access to anything and everything 24/7 is creating an anxious generation. “Our job is to provide young people, perhaps for the first time, with a healthy experience with an adult in a safe environment to explore their identity,” says Nadigel. Over time, clients can take the experience and its accompanying sense of calm with them.

Nadigel suggests that clinicians working with youth get comfortable with the technology. “You have to ‘get’ what they are doing and be comfortable sharing their world,” he says. (See Cyberspace 101 sidebar.) Clinicians may even incorporate therapy practices using technology the way adolescents do. In addition to teaching teenage clients mindfulness meditation to cope with external pressure, Nadigel sometimes sends a text-message with a specific tip (e.g., how to take three deep breaths). “I’m using a modern-day technology to teach a thousand-year-old tradition to a teen about centering herself in math class,” he says.

Once Nadigel gains their trust, his adolescent clients usually are happy to share their virtual worlds with him, walking through their Facebook and MySpace profiles, for example. “I engage them about facets of their page, building more trust, and when the moment presents itself, I explore some issues with them: What is the young person getting out of this? What do they really want out of life? It’s not different than what we normally do in therapy, but it’s a new avenue to peer into.”

Like traditional therapy, epiphanies take time and trust, and with young kids, often involve therapy with the entire family, says Nadigel. He reminds clinicians that there is tremendous peer pressure on kids to be crazier, sexier, cooler online, and that the process of getting them to understand the consequences of actions in cyberspace can be an uphill battle. “But it shouldn’t be avoided or overlooked,” he says.