Mental Health Awareness Is Easy. The Rest Of It Is Not.

The young woman was 21 years old, home from an out-of-state university most parents in this county would consider a destination. She had come back to Peachtree City in the middle of the semester with panic attacks she could not control.

Her therapist told me she sees people struggling even though they are highly successful. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I wanted to understand what is actually happening to the people of our community, so I sat down with her.

Connie Jones is a Licensed Professional Counselor who has been practicing here for more than 20 years and who runs Arise Counseling and Coaching. She has been doing this work long enough to have a clear view of how the people walking into her office have changed. What she described is not unique to her practice. It is the shape of something happening across our community.

Many of us have lost our footing. We have been adrift for a long time. We just did not have a name for it until something broke.

But Jones was clear about something else from the start. This is not a story about broken people. The clients she sees are intelligent, capable, and often highly successful. Many of them are doing well in important areas of their lives. What she sees underneath is not hopelessness. It is disconnection. And disconnection, she said, is something that can be healed.

A Generation Under Pressure

The symptoms are the part most people recognize. Anxiety. Depression. Self-harm. Eating disorders. Obsessive-compulsiveness.

Jones told me she is seeing these at higher volume, at younger ages, and with more intensity than she was a decade ago. The CDC’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released in 2024, supports what she is describing. Roughly 40% of American high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023, up from 30% in 2013. More than one in five seriously considered suicide. Roughly one in ten attempted it. For girls, the numbers are sharper: 53% of female students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, compared to 28% of male students.

Those numbers describe a phenomenon. What they do not describe is the cause.

Mental health conditions are shaped by many things. Biology, genetics, trauma, family history, and socioeconomic stress all play real roles, and for many young people those factors are primary. But Jones said she is also seeing something else, a pattern that runs alongside and often amplifies those conditions, and that does not get named as often as it should.

The easy answer is the phone, and there is real truth in that answer. Screens and social media are absolutely contributing to rising anxiety, comparison, overstimulation, and emotional strain in young people. The parenting columns that have been pointing to phones for years are not wrong about what they see. Jones agrees with much of it. But she does not think the phone is the whole story, and her clinical experience tells her something else is also at work underneath. The anxiety and the depression are real, she said, but they are signals that something deeper is asking for attention. The disconnection underneath the symptoms is older than the phone and harder to name.

Many of the young people who walk into her practice, she said, have become disconnected from the essence of who they are underneath layers of pressure, comparison, and performance.

They have been ranked since elementary school. They have been measured, evaluated, and compared. They spend their adolescence trying to be the version of themselves their parents, their schools, their coaches, and their social media feeds tell them to be. Their nervous systems are running hot all the time. They have not been quiet long enough to find out what their own thoughts sound like underneath all of it. The identity they are supposed to be forming during these years has been crowded out by the performance of it.

A teenager in this community said something similar in this paper last week, naming the same gap from the inside: “Half of us are internally panicking because we don’t even know who we are outside of grades and extracurriculars.”

That, Jones said, is what she is treating in those clients. Not the phone. The phone is just one of the forces making it harder. What she is treating, in case after case, is young people who have had little room to discover who they actually are when no one is watching.

In Fayette County, the distance between who young people are performing to be and who they actually are has had visible consequences. Dawn Oparah, who runs Fayette FACTOR, told 11Alive last fall that her organization had been tracking an uptick in self-harm and drug use in the county. She also said something that deserves a wider frame than it usually gets. “It’s not a school system issue,” she said. “It’s a community issue.” 

She was right, though the community issue runs deeper than most awareness campaigns are willing to say.

It is not just what is happening to our kids. It is what is happening to all of us.

Adrift in a Different Way

The young people are often the part of this story that gets covered. They are not the whole story.

Jones told me that the parents who bring their kids in are often as anxious as the kids. The kid is what the family notices first because the kid is the one falling apart visibly. The parents are usually falling apart quietly.

But there is something else Jones described that stayed with me. The parents, in many cases, are also disconnected from themselves. Not in the way their teenagers are. They have not been suppressed by an impossible performance standard. They have been consumed by obligation for long enough that the self underneath the obligation has gone quiet. They know exactly who they are as workers, parents, spouses, and neighbors. They have no idea who they are beyond those roles.

The national data on adults reflects this, though it is usually framed as a stress crisis rather than an identity one. The 2023 Surgeon General’s advisory called loneliness a public health crisis and reported that roughly half of American adults experience meaningful loneliness with health consequences comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness at that scale is not simply a failure to connect with other people. It is often what happens when a person has drifted far enough from themselves that genuine connection with others becomes difficult to sustain. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey has found the majority of adults reporting physical or emotional symptoms tied to stress, among the highest rates in the high-income world.

Parents are a category of their own. The Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory called Parents Under Pressure found that 48% of parents said most days their stress was completely overwhelming, compared to 26% of other adults. 41% said most days they were so stressed they could not function. Childcare costs have risen roughly 26% in the past decade. What the data describes is not simply overworked adults. It is a generation of people running so hard to meet external demands that the inner work Jones described, the work of knowing who you actually are, has become something they have not made time for in years.

Locally, the picture is consistent with the national one. Roughly 13.5% of adults in Fayette County report frequent mental distress. The county averaged 12 suicide deaths a year in the 2010s, but that number is now likely higher due to a cluster of recent losses.

Most adults in this community are not going to describe themselves as anxious. They are going to say they are tired. Stretched. Just trying to get through the week. That is an accurate description. It is also a description of someone who has not had a quiet moment to hear their own voice in longer than they can remember.

The Forces That Pull Us Away From Ourselves

I have been thinking about Jones’s diagnosis for a few days now, and I keep returning to the same question. If part of the deeper problem is that so many of us have become disconnected from ourselves, what produced that?

We live inside an economy that has a specific incentive to construct our identities for us. Not in a vague philosophical sense. In a literal one. The companies that sell us things have spent years telling us that the way we look, the way we live, and who we are is not good enough. The point of that messaging is not simply to make us feel inadequate. The point is that an externally constructed identity is a profitable one. A person who knows who they are and what they actually want is a difficult consumer to sell to. A person who has outsourced their sense of self to brands, status, and the approval of others is a much easier one.

The social platforms run on a more specific fuel. The old advertising line was that “sex sells.” It does not, at least not on social media. What sells is outrage. A widely cited 2017 study by William Brady and colleagues at NYU found that each additional moral-emotional word in a political social media post was associated with roughly 20% more shares. The follow-up research the same team published in 2021 in Science Advances found that the engagement loop trains us to post angrier content over time because angrier content is what gets rewarded. The outrage does not just make us furious at each other. It fills the silence in which we might otherwise hear ourselves. A person cycling through hours of anger and counter-anger online has had fewer hours to think a thought that is genuinely their own.

The comparison instinct predates the phone. Humans have always measured themselves against each other. What the phone has done is industrialize it. We see the highlight reel of a hundred other lives every day, compare it to the unedited footage of our own, and learn, slowly and without realizing it, to see ourselves through other people’s eyes rather than our own. That is a form of self-disconnection as real as any other. It does not feel like loss because it happens gradually, one scroll at a time.

And then there is the time problem. The inner work Jones described, the work of knowing who you actually are, requires silence, space, and unhurried attention. Those are the things the economy, the platforms, and the calendar systematically deprive us of. The job needs more. The kids need more. The inbox needs more. None of it makes room for the question Jones said her clients have rarely been asked. Who are you when no one is watching?

That is the air our kids are growing up breathing. The wonder is not that so many of them are anxious. The wonder is that any of them are not.

Two Different Approaches

Here is the part of the conversation I did not expect.

Jones told me about something she hears constantly. People call her office. Many have tried therapy before. They say it did not work for them. They say it did not help. Some have lost hope in the process entirely. That, she said, is what breaks her heart.

She was careful about what she meant. Not all therapy. Not therapy as a category because therapy saves lives. Many incredible clinicians do meaningful work every day. Medication, stabilization, trauma-informed care, and supportive counseling are often the right first step, and for many people they are the whole answer. The pattern Jones is describing is the one that opens after that first step, when the symptoms have been managed and the person is still waiting to feel different.

The pattern often looks like this. A family notices something is wrong. They get their child into counseling. The child sits through eight or ten months of reflective listening, feels heard and supported, and walks out the door no closer to herself than when she walked in. The symptoms have been managed. The disconnection underneath them has not been touched. The parents wonder what they paid for. The teenager wonders why she does not feel any different.

“It breaks my heart and infuriates me,” she said. “Because it can be so different.”

That frustration, Jones made clear, is not directed at other therapists or at the people who stopped going. It is directed at the situation itself. People lose hope when therapy does not produce the change they were looking for, and Jones wants them to know that healing, deeper connection, and real transformation are still available to them, even if a previous experience did not get them there.

The distinction she is drawing is a real one in clinical practice, between therapy that helps people tolerate their symptoms and therapy that helps people understand and rebuild the self underneath those symptoms. Both have value. The first is often the necessary foundation for the second. What Jones is describing is the gap that opens when the first kind ends and the second kind never begins.

Parents whose teenagers have tried therapy without lasting improvement should hear that their child’s experience is not universal. Therapy that goes nowhere is not the only kind that exists. Eight months of it without lasting change is not a verdict on the person who sat through it. It may mean the deeper work has not yet begun.

And that deeper work, Jones said, is where the hope actually lives.

The Work of Finding Yourself

Jones told me she wants people in this community to hear something clearly. People are not broken. They are disconnected, and disconnection can be repaired. Healing is possible. Reconnection is possible. The people she works with are not beyond help. They often need support slowing down, reconnecting with themselves, learning to regulate their nervous systems, and understanding what is actually happening underneath the symptoms. The work, she said, is about helping people learn to live from a more grounded, authentic, and emotionally connected place rather than continuing in constant survival and performance.

“I want to speak the truth,” she told me, “but I want people to hear it coming from my heart. It is hopeful. Things can be different.”

I asked Jones what she would tell people who are reading this and thinking about their own families. The answer was direct.

Do your own work before you ask anyone else to do theirs. The inner work Jones described, knowing who you are beyond your roles and your obligations and the expectations of everyone around you, is not something you can assign to your child while skipping it yourself. Parents who have not had the chance to do that work themselves may struggle to model it for others.

If you or your child has tried therapy and it did not work, do not assume therapy itself is the wrong answer. Try someone different. Ask the next clinician what success looks like for the kind of work you need and on what timeline. If the answer is vague, that itself is information.

Limit the noise where you can. No one in 2026 can eliminate it. But every hour off the device is an hour where you have a chance to hear your own thoughts.

Get outside. We live in a town with more than a hundred miles of paths and more parks than most cities our size. Use them. Get your child on a team, a trail, or in a creek. Do the same for yourself.

Have conversations. Five minutes a day of talking with no phones and no screens. Ask, “What was the best thing today?” Ask, “What was the worst?” The questions are not the point. The minutes of real, undivided attention are.

None of these require money, professional credentials, or permission. They are choices any family in this community can begin making today. The reconnection Jones described does not start with a referral. It starts with the decision to slow down long enough to hear what is underneath.

The Cost of Staying Lost

What the clinicians in this town are seeing is real, and the forces making all of it harder are not going away. The young people walking through counselors’ doors in Peachtree City anxious and disconnected from themselves are walking through every door in this community, and so are the adults who raised them. Most of them have not yet found their way to the kind of room where the question actually gets asked.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Jones what she would say to the family that does not know where to start. She told me the work was hard. She told me the people in her office know it is hard. But then she said the line I have been thinking about since.

“It is harder to stay lost where they are than to do the work.”

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. The awareness is the easy part. The work is the rest of it.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by call or text. The Georgia Crisis and Access Line is available at 800-715-4225.