Mental Health During Emerging Adulthood: Continuity and Discontinuity in Courses, Causes, and Functions.

Abstract

As one leaves high school and ventures into emerging adulthood, the new demands on one's inter-and intrapersonal resources may be extensive, testing and sometimes overwhelming one's coping capacity. In the United States, there is a deeply rooted norm that this is the time one needs to begin experiencing emotional, financial, and overall lifespace independence from one's family (Arnett, 2000(Arnett, , 2004. This transition may trigger some diverging courses of mental health: Some troubled adolescents, who perhaps experienced a mismatch between their needs and the affordances provided by their family, may find new life in this transition out of the family home; others doing well in adolescence, perhaps because of a good match with their primary contexts, may lose this match (and lose their way) as they enter the new contexts and social roles of emerging adulthood, which may result in brand new difficulties and emergent psychopathology. And still others may use this time of increased personal freedom, loose conventional bonds, and experimentation to get a little crazy on their journey to becoming well-adjusted adults.In this chapter we embed considerations of mental health-particularly in terms of overall well-being, substance use, antisocial behavior, and depressive affect-within the experience of emerging adulthood. As a starting point, we offer the following general observations about the course of selected indices of mental health and maladaptation during emerging adulthood.• In the general population, mental health improves and problem behaviors subside. Consider Figures 6.1-6.4, where, for example, during I (Schulenberg) gratefully acknowledge grant support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA01411) and the National Institute on Mental Health (MH59396). We appreciate the helpful comments of the editors and thank Ginny Laetz, Tanya Hart, and Patti Meyer for their assistance.

Modeling Minority Stress Effects on Homelessness and Health Disparities among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men

“…High rates of major depression and daily marijuana use in our sample greatly exceeded those reported in the emerging adult population in the USA. 1,44 The high rate of homelessness in our sample, while it may be due to our peer-based sampling methods, allowed us to make meaningful comparisons regarding minority stress, homelessness, major depressive symptoms, and elevated marijuana use among homeless and stably housed YMSM. This analysis may help inform future population-based studies to identify sources of health disparities within groups of YMSM.…”

Internet gambling and risk-taking among students: An exploratory study

“…Some researchers report that this period represents a stage where youth, as a group, exhibit a disproportional amount of reckless behavior, sensation seeking, and risk taking (Arnett, 1992(Arnett, , 2000(Arnett, , 2007Bradley & Wildman, 2002;Duangpatra, Bradley & Glendon, 2009;LaBrie, Shaffer, LaPlante & Wechsler, 2003;Nelson & Barry, 2005;Worthy, Jonkman & Blinn-Pike, 2010). Most studies of risk and college students involve sexual behavior, driving, and alcohol and/or drug abuse (Bradley & Wildman, 2002;Duangpatra et al, 2009;Ravert et al, 2009;Schulenberg & Zarrett, 2006); despite its normalization, gambling can be considered a high-risk activity (LaBrie et al, 2003;Stuhldreher, Stuhldreher & Forrest, 2007;Worthy et al, 2010).…”

Correlates of Binge Drinking in a Sample of Canadian University Students

“…Working from a developmental psychopathology perspective on emerging adulthood that focuses on the health risks associated with life transitions (Schulenberg & Maggs, 2002;Schulenberg & Zarrett, 2006), it was expected that binge drinking would be marked by greater cooccurrence of mental health problems; in actuality, almost none of the mental health variables in the present study differed between binge drinkers and non-binge drinkers for either gender. Despite other findings in the literature showing that anxiety and depression (Mushquash et al, 2013;Swendsen et al, 1998), positive and negative affect (Townshend & Duka, 2005), and indicators of wellbeing such as self-esteem or social alienation (Mohamed & Ajmal, 2015) are connected to binge drinking or alcohol use, no such associations were significant in the present sample of Canadian university students.…”

“…The theoretical background to this study is rooted in a developmental psychopathology perspective on emerging adulthood, one that focuses on the link between life transitions and health risks (Schulenberg & Maggs, 2002;Schulenberg & Zarrett, 2006). Such a perspective conceptualizes the transition to college as a critical period during which both developmental and contextual transitions can cause disruptive shifts in roles and expectations, heightened distress (Adlaf, Gliksman, Demers, & Newton-Taylor, 2001) and increased vulnerability to disordered mental health (Conley, Kirsch, Dickson, & Bryant, 2014).…”