Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge

Addresses the increasing mental health struggles among young people and argues for creating learning environments characterized by both compassion and challenge

Alarming statistics in recent years indicate that mental health problems like depression and anxiety have been skyrocketing among youth. While major stakeholders argue over whether we need greater compassion or whether so-called coddling might in fact be driving up rates of mental health problems and we should instead introduce more challenge, psychologist and professor Sarah Rose Cavanagh presents extensive evidence to argue that this is a false duality. Instead, she proposes that first we need to create learning and living environments characterized by compassion, and then we need to guide our youth into practices that encourage challenge.

In Mind over Monsters, Cavanagh highlights the voices of actual students and supplements these insights with science sourced not just from psychology and sociology but also pedagogy, neuroscience, and critically evaluated peer-reviewed research. To identify solutions, Cavanagh interviews a roster of experts across the country who are dedicating their lives working with young people to help them actualize their goals. The result of these combined sources of inquiry indicates that to encourage youth mental health, we need to create what Cavanagh calls compassionate challenge-learning environments that help our students face their fears, to vanquish their monsters, but in a supportive, safe, and even playful way.

Mind over Monsters bridges the opposing sides of the youth mental health crisis and offers a new path out-one that does not just treat symptoms but encourages the overall health of young people.