Lesson 7: Early and Middle Adulthood and Mental Health

Attention

Health, Stress, and Coping
Planning for Health Care Needs- Family, Self, and Parents' Needs
Physical, Cognitive, Social-Emotional Peaks and Growth

"Sandwiched" between the needs of family by creation, marriage, commitment to significant other(s), and the changing needs of aging parents. Early adulthood, and middle-adulthood can bring challenges never imagined. Simply growing up to adult status, does not mean all the things that children imagine are the priviledge and UNDER the control of adults actually happen.

Expect the unexpected. No one warned you!

Economic challenges. Global economy.
Career planning, advisement, transition.
Mid-life crisis. So, you are NOT the CEO of the company you work for.
Divorce, separation, death of spouse.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

• Explain the normal development process of adults and midlife crisis.
• Describe protective and risk factors related to mental health problems among adult populations.
• Explain several common mental health problems among adults and the related symptoms.

Teaching

Reading

• Read the article entitled "Are You a Natural?" by Bouchard, T., Lykken, D., McGue, M., Segal, N., & Tellellegen, A. (1990), either from the handbook on reserve in Lunder Library by Roger Hock, entitled "Forty Studies that Changed Psychology," or going online through resourcs available to KVCC library.

Longitudinal studies in the behavioral sciences are invaluable because they permit you to see the beginnings, middles, and outcomes for behaviors of interest. They are difficult to conduct. They require time, financial resources to pull together the data, and keep track of people. Interests change in psychology, and in the behavioral sciences generally. You may well be in the "golden-age" of genetics and heredity for the behavioral sciences. This does not mean that parenting, and enculturation count for nothing. Nature and nature interact and bear greatly upon each other.

The Bouchard et. al. (1990) study was a landmark for measurable aspects of human behavior that could be tracked over time.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a measuremnt device, insofar as it can identity a four-letter "code" that is an outcome of questions concerning how the individual scales on four continua for different dimensions of behavior. The code, and its interpretation on a sixteen cell matrix should yield a "picture" of the assessment taker that tends to be VERY stable over time. Your personality, interests, health profile, and attitudes tend to be durable over time, even in the face of some very intense experience. With swirling changes, and increasing responsilbilities during early and middle adulthood, what is being stressed is this core at the center of your behavior. It is here that the adjustment to changing circumstance needs to make accomodation.

Lecture

Here is the story of Grandpa Ed Burtt, who died at 85 in 2014. He battled advanced cancer. The plan for his wife and himself was that when they reached late adulthood, they would reside with my friends Adam and Emily, who live in New Hampshire, and their now six children under the same roof. Not the same rooms, but, either an addition or extension to the house that they gave Adam and Emily the money to buy outright.

The plan, create a space within which Grandpa Ed and Grandma Ann could live.

Grandpa Ed and Grandma Ann purposefully skipped the generation that was own their children, and went to the grandchildren Adam and Emily instead. The generation skipped represented divorces, separation, and other issues that dictated the "gamble" on Adam and Emily.

I am somewhat in the loop here, because Adam and Emily's sixth child is named after me. When you get to be my age, 70, these things make a diiference to you!

The investment by Granpa Ed and grandma Ann made is called heritage.

But, it is also a quality of life decision. After making a life, and having a family of four children themselves, Grandpa Ed and Grandma Ann did not want to be cared for by strangers. Up until Grandpa Ed's diagnosis, this man fell trees, cut, split, hauled his own wood, and did all chores around a small cottage.

Around that time my friends in New Hampshire, Adam confided in me about how stressed he felt. With six children, and the sole support of his family, things are not always easy. Adam recentlly sent me an email accompanied by a picture of him "at the office." Adam is an arborist and a tree-climber. From 200 feet up-a-tree, the view to the ground is sobering. Adam additionally identified that with the responsibility of family, and grandparents for the future, he is not as prone as he once was to take chances while at work. Be aware: logging, and tree-climbing may well be the first or second most dangerous things a person can do routinely, short of first responder duties in a crisis situations.

Reading Grandpa Ed's autobiography through his 74th year, over 1200 pages, has given me great insight into not only his life, but the life of my friends Adam and Emily, who my wife and I have known for ten years when they only had their first child.
You may well wonder how many stories are out there that never get told, but should.

We experience childood and adolescence for approximatley 18 years, but spend the next two-thirds or three-quarters of our life in various stages of adulthhod.

In the year 2000, the population for the United States was more than one-half over the age of 50.

With a prediction that those born approximately between 1946 and 1964, the baby boomers, the next 15 years may bring an additional 2 or 3 million of these into the diagnostic range for Alzheimer's dementia. There really was a good reason for Preident Obama's B.R.A.I.N. innitiative in 2013. Getting older is not for the faint of heart. Taking care of them will be for the strong of will to say the least. Expect the seams to be at burst pressure for all health services, not the least of which will be community mental health!!

Assessment

Lesson 7 Quiz

1. What are the common mental health illnesses that adults encounter? Pick at least two, describing the symptoms, and resources that could be brought to bear in reducing the occurrence in the first instance of such outcomes.
2. What are some of the personality traits that could protect adults from mental health crisis? There is very substantial research here on social-emotional variables as well: networking, friendships, leisure pursuits, and so on.

Lesson 7 Discussion

I already know from reading some student replies in another course, that various life-span "clocks" run in your lives. How do you see your early and middle-adulthood unfolding? Planning for the future, or, re-vising strategies when necessary can be empowering! Control what you can. What you cannot, letting go can be a strategy too.