Pubertal Hormones Trigger Changes Across The Brain

If you think adolescence lasts beyond eighteen, you’re in good company. Many researchers argue that adolescence extends way beyond this point, for both biological and societal reasons. For most people in Western societies, few of the traditional markers of adulthood, like being financially independent from parents, getting married and having babies, apply at the age of eighteen. But averages are useful. In my experience, the idea that adolescence lasts this long comes as good news to people in their late teens and early twenties. Knowing they’re still changing helps them feel better about various aspects of their life, like their mood or the choices they’ve made. Broadly, adolescence is a period of risk for mental illness because it’s one long series of these potential triggers. A preexisting genetic vulnerability that lies dormant in childhood can come online in adolescence, either triggered by the biological changes inherent to this age period, the stressful events that happen at this time, or both. But it’s this exact series of changes that can, for some people, trigger a mental disorder. Pubertal hormones activate two key processes required for the transition to adulthood. Second, there must be psychological development. There are a host of cognitive and emotional skills needed to become a fully independent adult, capable of things that children cannot do, or at least not at a sufficiently mature level.

Good Times

Adults reflect on their past behavior, plan for the future, evaluate information to make complex decisions, resist temptation, and consider the thoughts and feelings of others. Across many mental illnesses, there is a sharp rise in rates of mental disorders specifically once a young person hits puberty, including depression, anxiety disorders, conduct disorder, and eating disorders. The same pattern is seen for many other disorders and their symptoms. Sadly, having a somewhat unhealthy relationship with food and your body is extremely common in adolescent girls, and indeed adult women. Their breasts develop and they put on weight, they grow body hair, they may experience skin problems like acne. This can then kick off a problematic chain of feelings and behaviors. She might have imagined these criticisms and judgments, or they might have been explicitly said. But notice that these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are also symptoms of eating disorders, the ones just described. If these processes start to balloon or to take over a girl’s life, an eating disorder can develop. Therefore, one way that puberty can contribute to an eating disorder is it triggers changes in physical appearance. The timing of puberty is also important. For girls, beginning puberty early is also associated with an increased risk of depression, panic attacks, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse.

When The Time Comes

When it comes to eating disorders, starting puberty early can magnify the process I’ve described above. This can take its toll. Pubertal hormones must also be doing something else. Pubertal hormones trigger significant changes across the brain, both in terms of anatomical structure, levels of brain activity, and connections between regions. This continues right through the teenage years and beyond. And the brain, of course, is the route through which we experience all our psychology. Unsurprisingly, then, pretty much all our psychological faculties undergo significant development in adolescence, but the processes that are most for our purposes and that I’m going to focus on particularly relate to social interactions. A lot of the psychological changes happening in adolescents are therefore related to how we perceive, respond to, think about, and interact with other people. We must interpret a person’s tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. During adolescence, we are inventing ourselves. Critically, adolescents also start incorporating what other people think about them into their sense of self. But in adolescence, when we become better able to understand what other people think about us, their opinions become richly interwoven into our understanding of who we are.

In My Place

If an adolescent is popular and has warm and supportive friendships and relationships, this is not a problem. But if an adolescent is treated badly by those around them, it can affect their fundamental sense of self. This is dangerous because a healthy, positive view of ourselves is critical in protecting ourselves against mental illness. As will be familiar by now, many people with eating disorders or depression, for example, dislike or hate themselves or their body, and feel that they have low worth or are unlovable. Equally, an adolescent could have close friendships but still believe that others are judging them extremely negatively, as happens in social anxiety disorder, again leading to negative beliefs about themselves. In fact, social anxiety disorder has been referred to as the prototypical adolescent disorder because it represents so clearly what can happen when a fundamental process of adolescence, the social reorientation, goes awry. Either way, adolescents’ acute concern about what others think about them can make some individuals vulnerable to mental disorder. Related to this is the concept of social exclusion or rejection. In 2010, a group of researchers, studied the effects of social exclusion on mood and anxiety levels. To do this, they used a computer game called Cyberball, in which the participant plays a simple game of catch with two cartoon characters on screen. The participant is told that the characters are being controlled by other real participants, in a very different room or school, when in fact the pattern of throwing and catching is preprogrammed by the computer. But in the second round, they initially pass the ball to the participant, but then start to ignore her, passing the ball only between themselves. All participants reported feeling more ignored and excluded after the second round of the game. For the youngest group only, anxiety levels rose significantly increased. This has since been supported by several other studies. The hypothesis is that it hurts more because fitting in with peers is so deeply important in adolescence, but also because, at that age, we are less good at regulating our emotional reactions to upsetting events, something we get better at as we mature.