Finding a space between silence and a scream

As a traumatised teen, Annie Rogers didn’t speak for five months; now she’s helping young people find ways to articulate their pain

ANNIE ROGERS was 16 when she stopped speaking for five months. She was later to describe her behaviour “as the exaggeration of the teenager’s shrug, the ubiquitous gesture when speech fails”.

Suffering from psychosis, she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide.

She believed she was Joan of Arc and that she had had wood chips embedded in her arms by the cardinals of the church who were trying to burn her.

“I embraced silence as though it were both protest and protection. As though, because in the end it was neither,” she writes in her book The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma (2006).

She could find no words to express what she had endured in her childhood growing up in St Louis, Missouri – being sexually abused for several years and the suicide of her father when she was five.

However, it is hard to say that this is what “caused” her psychosis, says Rogers (57) in a phone interview from Massachusetts, where she is professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst.

“Because I was the child I was, I experienced things in a particular way. Somebody else could have had exactly the same experience and not subsequently developed psychosis.”

She describes trauma as an “excess that is unbearable” and stresses that the tolerance of trauma varies from individual to individual. But what is “unbearable” becomes “unsayable” – even to one’s self.

In and out of psychiatric hospital at least twice a year up to the age of 29, her life then changed completely. It was through psychoanalysis, and one “very talented male analyst” in particular, that Rogers was able to deal with all that had happened and find firm footing for her onward journey to becoming a Harvard professor and clinical psychologist, helping other abused children to decode the language of their unconscious.

Psychoanalysis “allowed me to have the life that I have. As a young person I was in a lot of anguish,” she says.

Although Rogers, and many of the very troubled young people she has worked with, are extreme cases, anguish and adolescence often go hand in hand. It is a time when both boys and girls face “a sudden, shattering awareness of how inadequate the adult world is”, as she puts it. No matter how good their childhood, they have to come to terms with the many mistakes of both society and family.

“The result is they are thrust into acute and uncomfortable questions,” she says. They have to find a way to express their disillusionment and to challenge the status quo to make it through adolescence, into adulthood, and begin to build foundations for their own lives.

Three-quarters of mental health problems emerge between the ages of 12 and 25. Without the right support, a mental health problem can develop into chronic mental illness.

It is crucial that adolescents can voice their experience of transition, so they don’t have to do whatever it takes to shut down what’s going on internally, says Rogers – be it turning to excessive alcohol, taking drugs, or acting in other risky ways that may lead to harming themselves or other people.

For every voice, there must be somebody to listen. A national survey of 14,000 teenagers and young adults, published last month by the youth mental health organisation Headstrong and the UCD School of Psychology, found “one good adult” in a young person’s life is key to mental wellbeing.

But many adults don’t want to know what teenagers are really thinking. And young people, in turn, can struggle to express their feelings.

“Some parents avoid opening up anything difficult with their adolescents because they are afraid of what might come up,” says Rogers. “So there is no invitation and there are a lot of things that come in place of an invitation,” ranging from praise to condemnation.

Young people’s willingness to do and say what another generation would rather not know about makes uncomfortable listening, she says.

“What we refuse to know about ourselves really does come back to haunt us,” maybe in the form of a mid-life crisis.

“I think that is sometimes why it is so hard for people to really listen to youth because there is something about the way that young people enact or raise questions that is disturbing. They remind us that it is human to want to know what is being censored.”

What is also challenging for adults right now, she observes, “is that boys and girls are crossing and moving around in exploration of their own gender identities and their own sexuality in ways unknown to previous generations”.

She advises parents to use very open-ended questions in conversation with adolescents. Say and comment very little; be patient and let the young person find their own way.

“Young people recognise when somebody really wants to listen or when they are in the presence of somebody who really would rather not know,” says Rogers, who will be in Dublin next week to speak at a public forum entitled Allowing Young People to Say the Unsayable, organised by Headstrong. She will use three case studies, including a 13-year-old girl who has been bullied at school, to illustrate the challenges young people face.

Rogers has been spending her summers in Ireland for the past 17 years with her Irish-born partner Íde O’Carroll, who comes from Tullamore, Co Offaly. They have a house in Lismore, Co Waterford, to which they plan to retire.

Rogers uses these months off from academia for the “joy” of creative work – visual art and writing. A published author of two non-fiction books, short stories and poetry, she is currently finishing her first novel.

Although an adolescent’s questioning of norms and ideals imposed during childhood may go back to the time of Cain and Abel (the children of Adam and Eve), the landscape through which today’s young people travel to adulthood has altered from even the one their parents journeyed through.

The pace of change in the world and the kinds of information available to young people is radically different than it was even 20 years ago, points out Rogers. She sees young people struggle to find their place in a world of information overload and where social media has raised the stakes in peer relationships.

“It is hard for me to get my head around how quickly and widespread their reputations can be used and misused. I think that’s very scary for adolescents.”

There is an emerging phenomenon in the US, she says, where young men in particular are much more comfortable keeping in touch with friends through social media than they are face to face or even in telephone conversations. “It is hard for them to form those really strong friendships, which is the way people begin to build a life.”

Rogers believes that, generally, it is harder for boys to find places to speak. “They are driven to act – not necessarily violently. They are driven to enact something they can’t say.”

Whereas girls “make a space with one another that is extremely intimate sometimes, and often their experiences are heard more fully than is the case with young men”.

Today’s parents are acutely aware of child sexual abuse and are very protective. “Here in the US children and adolescents are driven a lot of places,” says Rogers. “My generation were out walking the streets, on buses – we were let rove all day.”

This difference has made the parent-adolescent relationship “too pressingly close” now, she suggests. As a university professor, she sees at first-hand the effects of so-called helicopter parenting, with students checking in with their parents on mobile phones three or four times a day.

“I think parents have this need to be in touch and young people have this need to be in touch – it is positive in one way, being in touch, and in another way I worry that young people don’t get to explore the way they should.”

It is important that young people are allowed to fail and make mistakes. One second-year student told her his father edited all his papers. “I looked at him and said ‘do you have a learning disability?’” When he said no, she advised him to stop going to his father and instead go down to the college’s writing centre and befriend somebody who could teach him how to write his own work.

With people in their early 20s persisting in heavy reliance on their parents, where exactly is the finishing line for adolescence?

“What a lot of people consider the finishing line, I consider the starting line, and that is the place where a young adult can begin to make and maintain initial commitments with a real sense that they are chosen, even if they fail in the end, that he or she is responsible for the choice.”

For some young people these commitments, be it a career or a relationship, are delayed while others have to make them very early, she points out. But ultimately they take those first steps, “and they don’t blame it on Mom or Dad”.

What can young people do to help themselves to reach that stage of self-development?

Some young people find “extraordinary friends”, she says, who “are able to accompany them through things they need to know. Other young people turn in some way to the arts and become really talented in them, and it becomes a way of both achieving something and saying something.”

However, she feels most for young people who can’t find a form for what they can’t tell and they can’t say.

“It breaks out in their bodies in physical symptoms, or they turn to staging something that is unsayable. The result is they get a label or a bottle of pills . . . They are left high and dry with their own suffering,” leading to a sense of real desperation and causing “a kind of anguish that doesn’t get resolved”.

As someone who resolved her own anguish by engaging in lengthy psychoanalysis, is it an ongoing struggle to maintain her mental wellbeing?

“I will say with real confidence that I have very, very strong ground under me,” she replies. “It has been shaped by those early experiences but I do not struggle in my current life – I am happy in my work, my love and I am a very stable, strong kind of person – and you wouldn’t expect that.”

* The public forum by Annie Rogers, Allowing Young People to Say the Unsayable, will be held in The Exchange on Lower Gardiner Street, Dublin, on June 14th from 6.30-8.30pm. Admission free but seats must be booked by emailing orla.omalley@headstrong.ie or tel: 01- 472 7010.

HEADSTRONG YOUTH: ‘We don’t want to be helped – we want to be heard’

When Tony Bates was setting up the youth mental health organisation Headstrong six years ago, he gathered young people around to help him think through what he was going to do.

“I didn’t know what it was like being 17 or 18 in 2006,” points out Bates, a clinical psychologist and columnist with HEALTHplus.

Looking at what the organisation’s mission statement might be, he suggested something along the lines of: Headstrong is here to help young people in their journey into adulthood.

“I thought that was brilliant. They all looked at me and said, ‘no thank you’. I couldn’t see their problem, but they said, ‘we don’t want to be helped, we want to be heard.’”

It is a message that Headstrong has promoted ever since, through advocacy, research and also services that are offered through its Jigsaw centres, “a place where every young person in the community can turn to and find someone they can talk to about whatever they are going through”, he explains.

The supports available range from peer to professional, and anybody experiencing distress that is beyond the capability of the centre will be helped to find the local statutory mental health team.

Jigsaw centres are operating in five communities at present and Headstrong is working towards having 12 by next year. Bates pays tribute to Government agencies who “have been co-operating every step of the way. We couldn’t do it without the HSE.”

In the autumn Headstrong will publish a report which, he says, makes a strong, evidence-based argument for the cost-effectiveness of the work it is doing.

Practising what it preaches, Headstrong consults young people at every level of its operation and two sit on the board.

“Since they have come on the whole culture has changed – we see problems, they see solutions.”

Delighted that Annie Rogers accepted Headstrong’s invitation to speak at next week’s public forum, he adds: “I think she really understands the journey adolescents and young adults are living through. I think she will bring a depth and freshness to the conversation about youth mental health which we won’t have heard before.”

For more information see headstrong.ieand jigsaw.ie