Name: Giselle Molaei
Social Justice Group: 2021-2022, Children, Mental Health, and the Pandemic
Date of Fieldwork: March 4, 2022
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Lisa Damour, clinical psychologist
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :
On March 4th my group and I had a great opportunity to speak with Dr. Lisa Damour. Dr. Damour is a clinical psychologist, author and podcast maker. When Dr. Damour was six years old and a friend of hers, Carla, moved from the U.S. to London around the same time. Carla was studying to become a psychologist under the guidance of, at the time, a famous psychologist, Anna Froyd. Young Lisa was spending many of her days with Carla and became fascinated by the practice. Carla explained all of her training to little Lisa which just made her even more interested. When Lisa moved back to the U.S. when she was seven she knew that she wanted to be a psychologist and she got her PHD when she turned twenty six years old.
Dr. Damour told us that she believes that the impact that Covid has had on adolescents has been awful. She says that the job that teenagers are given is to become independent and make friends and Covid has made that extremely difficult. She said that people who are less privileged and people who are already going through any sort of anxiety had another huge thing added to their lives that made their situation even more stressful. She said that the LGBTQ+ was also deeply affected by the pandemic and most of the time at their homes they were not accepted for who they were and school was a place to be loved by other people and they lost contact with that.
We asked Dr. Damour what she thinks is a step that parents can take towards helping their children with their mental health issues. Her response was very interesting. “I think we as parents should think about mental health in the same way we think about physical health.” She says we do lots of things to maintain our physical health and we should take that into account and use the same way of thinking and apply it to our mental health. She also thinks that there is a big misunderstanding with parents when they look at their kids’ mental health. They think it is a huge crisis as if it is a diagnosis, which is not the case at all. She also says that parents can have a lot of shame on their kids’ mental health and that is the worst thing you can do to yourself and more importantly your child.
Dr. Damour thinks that we can help as fellow teens by normalizing mental health issues to help people feel more comfortable around the topic. She really drilled into our heads the fact that there should be no shame in how you truly feel. This interview was incredibly inspiring and we are grateful for her words.
