Adolescents are Crazy

OK not all X are like that, but enough are

My kids are weird. They fly into rages about random things, try to have milkshakes for breakfast at 2:30 in the afternoon, and pester me about the mechanics of time travel when I’m trying to get undressed for bed.¹

Occasionaly these behaviors reach a level that prompts concern. Mrs. Apple Pie and I can periodically be found whispering in a private corner about whether one of our beloved children has the potential for some mental disorder or other due to bizarre behavior that may or may not be “a phase.”

And even though I’m usually the one pushing for patience and calm, mental illness is still a possibility that seems like it needs to be taken seriously. After all, given that I have adult relatives with mental illnesses, online friends with mentally ill children, and extensive memories of mentally ill friends growing up, the idea that one or more of our kids might turn out to be totally insane doesn’t seem, well, totally insane.

But now that I’ve unsettled you with the idea that having your children grow up to develop mental illness is a huge looming risk of childbearing, let me reassure you that there’s really no need to worry about them growing up to develop a mental illness. Because mental illness is the default state for teenage humans, and they are crazy already, long before they’re ready to move out.

Teachers Won’t Admit It

But they do seem to drink a lot, and studies show teachers suffer from burnout at high rates, from the psychological demands of the profession.² And well, being a parent of a large family is something like being a teacher, except that you don’t get weekends or summers off. In fact, you don’t even really get time off to sleep, because if someone comes running into the kitchen screaming at 4 AM about zombies, or dinosaurs, or dinosaur zombies, you’re pretty much stuck holding their hands and explaining to them that they shouldn’t worry, and everything is OK when it really isn’t because it’s 4 AM and you need to wake up in three hours to go to work.

And while the behavior of younger children is mostly cute, as they age they gradually start to get ideas. Maybe from you; maybe from YouTube; maybe from their very upstanding and not at all weird friends. But sometimes the ideas are purely a manifestation of their own creativity, and we’ve seen before how creativity can be fueled by insanity—or at least, by a predisposition towards insanity.

Now when you are wondering whether one (or all) of your very special children might in fact be showing signs of going off the deep end, you naturally do a lot of reading about prodromal schizophrenia. This is the early stage of schizophrenia that occurs before the onset of full psychotic symptoms. It’s observed through changes in behavior that are understood to precede the development of more overt schizophrenia symptoms like paranoia and auditory hallucinations. The medical literature³ describes the schizophrenia prodrome with symptoms like:

• Marked social isolation or withdrawal

• Marked impairment in role functioning

• Markedly peculiar behavior

• Marked impairment in personal hygiene and grooming

• Blunted or inappropriate affect

• Digressive, vague, overelaborate or circumstantial speech, or poverty of speech, or poverty of content of speech

• Odd beliefs or magical thinking

• Unusual perceptual experiences

• Marked lack of initiative, interests, or energy

And when a person reads this list, there’s a natural tendency to think, “Wow, that sounds pretty bad. If someone’s acting like that, I would definitely hope they’d get help fast.”

Unfortunately as I just found out today, it turns out that the diagnostic criteria of the schizophrenia prodrome may not actually be very useful. Why not? Is it because there is no prodromal phase that signals a problem before a person suffers a complete psychotic break from reality? No, everybody agrees the prodrome really exists, and really is a precursor for 75% of people who develop schizophrenia, and really does help to give some warning about the onset of serious psychosis.⁴ That’s not the problem. The problem is that the warning signs of the schizophrenia prodrome basically describe ordinary adolescent behavior.

That’s the finding of a large study led by Patrick McGorry,⁵ which gives this in the abstract:

In most cases of schizophrenia the onset of frank psychosis is preceded by a period of prodromal features. This period has been relatively neglected by researchers and is potentially important in promoting early intervention. The prevalence of DSM-111-R schizophrenia prodrome symptoms was assessed as part (n = 657) of a large (n = 2525) questionnaire-based survey of high school students. Individual symptoms were highly prevalent and the prevalence of DSM-111-R prodromes ranged from 10-15 to 50%. Despite methodological weaknesses, the data suggest that DSM-111-R prodromal features are extremely prevalent among older adolescents and unlikely to be specific for subsequent schizophrenia.

The results they report are pretty consistent with this conclusion:

Taken from table 2 of the study cited at footnote 5

If their sample is representative, it means that a majority of adolescents are at least occasionally into magical ideation—this is where a person believes their thoughts influence external events, or perceives secret meanings in random occurences. Then we have unusual perceptual experiences, which means hearing indistinct voices or whispers when no one is present, or feeling as though waking life is unreal and dreamlike, and that’s common to 45% of adolescents. My personal favorite, “markedly peculiar behavior,” is found in a quarter of the sample. Other research finds that these subclinical markers for schizophrenia decline so much with age that a 35-year old with a high genetic risk of schizophrenia looks less superstitious than a 20-year old at low risk:⁶

So not only are my kids probably going to turn out just fine, the icing on the cake is that I was fine, too. See before I found this out, I thought my own teenage craziness was because I had a genetic predisposition from a mentally ill parent, exascerbated by my religious upbringing, and by a peer group that was a little odd. Now I realize—hey! I was actually running about par for the course with only like one or two of these symptoms at any given time! I did my homework, graduated high school, held down jobs, regularly paid rent, and for the most part kept my suspicions about precognition, spirits, and ancient curses to myself.

What is it About Adolescence That Makes People Crazy?

Well if I’m allowed to speculate, I think adolescent nuttiness probably arises from three main sources.

First of all, mental abilities measured by IQ tests reach their peak in or shortly after adolescence. Although vocabulary does see modest increases up to around age 45, backward digit span reaches its maximum by 18, and processing speed reaches its highest levels by around age 16.⁷

Secondly, there appears to be a heightened neurological sensitivity to social stimuli in adolescence. While I’m skeptical about claims regarding the different regions of the brain, I will at least mention that increased activity in regions like the ventral striatum is implicated in heightened processing of experiences among adolescent peers.⁸⁹

Whether or not the ventral striatum has anything to do with it, there’s definitely a heightened importance ascribed to peer relationships in adolescence, matched by increasing amounts of time spent with friends.¹⁰ In fact, today I read that interest in peers spikes in adolescence whether you’re a human, or some other mammal, like, say, a rat.¹¹ (The rodent connection may help to explain why there was a sudden upsurge in the popularity of bad music as the earliest Millennials first entered adolescence.¹²)

Now while a 16 year old may be operating near their adult intelligence, their experience with that level of reasoning ability is desperately brief. Even worse, much of what they’ve been learning by then is also through authoritative teachers, and gossip from their peers, rather than through either empirical or rational means. So the upshot is that when you make the game-winning kick, and your friends notice you did that after eating at Torchy’s Tacos, well, your sample size of 1 seems really, really big, and your most trusted information source is telling you that’s enough: Torchy’s = You Win.

But the problem is worse than just these two things. Because the third issue has to deal with the way adolescence is a time when the typical teenager is plunged into a bath of hormones they have absolutely no idea what to do with. They’re horny, they’re confused, and they really know only one thing: You better not talk about this. At least, not openly, and definitely not to adults—and absolutely never to whomever ends up being the object of your first crush.¹³ And so it is that adolescents’ most significant interests take on the tinge of furtive, obsessive secrets, whispered in bathrooms and alleyways strewn with broken glass, or searched up online without any context or ability to sort reality from exaggeration or complete fabrication. Eight inches is average? 115 pounds is fat? Who the hell knows? I’m not making up the kind of embarassed confusion this causes: A teenager I know (who shall remain very, very nameless) got sick, and sort of touched themself, and then looked it up online, and in a panic, had to go to their mother to ask “Am I going to die?” They didn’t know!

And the worst part is the way that all of this drives you to desperation for a girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever, and then when you finally get one—they’re so alluring, and they’re interested in you, too, and your friends would die if they knew the way you were alone together, but the catch is that they’re also an adolescent! And after putting up with their weird hot, cold, rambunctious, scatterbrained, horny, angry, and all-at-once ambivalent insanity for a month or two all you can do is tear your hair out and ask “Why The #u*& Are You Like This? You’re driving me nuts!”

But I want you to know: It’s OK. It’s OK that they’re driving you nuts. Really.

It’s OK, because you’re an adolescent too. And you’re not supposed to be sane, you’re supposed to be nuts. This is your chance!

The rest of us are too old to be crazy without people firing us from our jobs and locking us up, but what are your friends going to say when you tell them “Whoa, my ears are ringing, and things feel really surreal all of a sudden, and is it just me or does that tree look like Slender Man?” You think they’re going to laugh at you or report it to your teachers? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. If they’re adolescents too, they’re probably thankful for the warning.

1. Also all of them hate cell phones, but so do I, so I’m guessing this strikes you as far more weird than it does me

2. Roloff, J., Kirstges, J., Grund, S., & Klusmann, U. (2022). How strongly is personality associated with burnout among teachers? A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(3), 1613-1650.

3. George, M., Maheshwari, S., Chandran, S., Manohar, J. S., & Rao, T. S. (2017). Understanding the schizophrenia prodrome. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 59(4), 505-509.

4. George, M., Maheshwari, S., Chandran, S., Manohar, J. S., & Rao, T. S. (2017). Understanding the schizophrenia prodrome. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 59(4), 505-509.

5. McGorry, P. D., McFarlane, C., Patton, G. C., Bell, R., Hibbert, M. E., Jackson, H. J., & Bowes, G. (1995). The prevalence of prodromal features of schizophrenia in adolescence: a preliminary survey. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 92(4), 241-249.

6. Saarinen, A., Lyytikäinen, L. P., Hietala, J., Dobewall, H., Lavonius, V., Raitakari, O., ... & Keltikangas-Järvinen, L. (2022). Magical thinking in individuals with high polygenic risk for schizophrenia but no non-affective psychoses—a general population study. Molecular Psychiatry, 27(8), 3286-3293.

7. Wisdom, N. M., Mignogna, J., & Collins, R. L. (2012). Variability in Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV subtest performance across age. Archives of clinical neuropsychology, 27(4), 389-397.

8. Sturman, D. A., & Moghaddam, B. (2011). The neurobiology of adolescence: changes in brain architecture, functional dynamics, and behavioral tendencies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(8), 1704-1712.

9. Telzer, E. H. (2016). Dopaminergic reward sensitivity can promote adolescent health: A new perspective on the mechanism of ventral striatum activation. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 17, 57-67.

10. Brown, B. B. (2004). Adolescents' relationships with peers. Handbook of adolescent psychology, 363-394.

11. Foulkes, L., & Blakemore, S. J. (2016). Is there heightened sensitivity to social reward in adolescence? Current opinion in neurobiology, 40, 81-85.

12. Granted, Kryptogal wants to blame my Generation X rather than Millennials for this sudden rise of terrible bands in the mid 90s, but her one example of a Gen-Xer who likes bad music is a Millennial (DeBoer), the perpetrators at Disco Demolition Night were young Boomers, and frankly, if you weren’t listening to Queensryche or pre-bus-accident Metallica in the early 90’s, I wasn’t talking to you.

13. My friend told my first crush when he found out, because he was a spaz.