An abundance of changes occurs during one’s teenage years. These changes include, but are not limited to, those changes that are related to puberty. These years can be extremely difficult for teenagers and, many times, these changes create a diminished self-esteem. Self-esteem is confidence in one’s own abilities. It could be the ability to talk to other people, the ability to believe in one’s self, the ability to feel proud of one’s actions, or even having a strong relationship with one’s family. There are several factors in which a person can either increase or decrease his or her self-esteem. Some of the negative factors include bullying, neglect, bad parenting, loneliness, not having friends, or even belonging to a group of “friends” that are prejudice. Along with a lowered self-esteem may come a lessened self-regard and self-respect. Lowered self-esteem has been positively correlated with suicide rates in teenagers, therefore, low self-esteem is a serious issue that needs to be confronted.
To increase one’s self-esteem, it is recommended by various psychologists to exercise daily, have a positive self-talk session with yourself, don’t compare yourself with others, and celebrate your accomplishments (Grohol, 2011). When a person has a low self-esteem it causes that individual to feel negative emotions. One of the strongest negative emotions and the most dangerous is depression.
Depression can take over a person’s mind, leaving the person numb. Someone who is depressed doesn’t have the motivation to get out of bed, to eat, or even to live. Those negative emotions can lead a person to having suicidal ideation and, in some cases, into committing suicide. Depression and a low self-esteem are two of the most common factors that are correlated with suicide ideation and suicide attempt. Based on The World Health Organization (2001), suicide is one of the three leading causes of death amongst adolescents.
Some people don’t understand the seriousness of a person with low self-esteem. People that have low self-esteem, see themselves as being worthless. Some people change from having a high self-esteem to having a very low self-esteem. People start to notice something “ugly” about themselves. This could lead people to have clinical depression, drug use, anorexia nervosa, and even suicide. It is important for experts to understand how having a low self-esteem can result in a serious illness. If a person has a low self-esteem and does not go to therapy or take some type of action, then that person may begin to start getting depressed and, eventually, that person is going to start to think about committing suicide.
There was a study conducted by Case Western University, which included 254 adolescent psychiatric outpatients and 288 high school students. The point of the study was to determine if there was a relationship between a low self-esteem and suicidal ideation among adolescents. Researchers used the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale to find out what adolescents thought about their own self-esteem. What researchers found, was that a low self-esteem leads to higher levels of negative emotions. Some of the negative emotions include depression, hopelessness, suicidal ideation and a high number of the attempts of adolescents that try to commit suicide (Overholser, 1995). Based on this information, we can tell how self-esteem is a really important factor in the lives of adolescents. Adolescents, since a young age, either build up their own self-esteem or destroy it, without even noticing it. The research also found out how self-esteem added to the understanding of suicidal ideation beyond that could be explained by depression (Overholser, 1995). This allows one to understand that low self-esteem is an extremely serious issue that must be treated.
There have been various ways in which an individual can get treated for low self-esteem. Some of these interventions include medications. In regards to self-esteem, some interventions have not had a sufficient number of studies done, such as complementary or alternative medicine. This is a group of health care organizations, practices, and treatments that are not widely thought of to be a part of conventional medicine, which is used as an aide to or in replacement of conventional care. This type of treatment could be a suitable option for individuals who do not seek treatment because of the stigma attached to mental illness, which is a common fear amongst people with mental illnesses (Libby, Pilver, & Desai, 2012). Moreover, the recent increasing apprehension of the usage of medications has caused many to stray away from the common treatments currently provided for different disorders and illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Resultantly, this has led people to become progressively curious about alternative medicine.
One type of alternative medicine comes from the field of positive psychology. Positive psychology is a field of psychology that has not been studied for very long and which has been looked upon by some psychologists as senseless. Positive psychology is a branch of psychology which focuses on the strengths and virtues that allow and encourage people to flourish and improve their well-being. According to Seligman (2002), positive psychology has three main components. These components are positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Positive psychology allows any person to build themselves up and better themselves. While most of the fields in psychology tend to focus on treating the patient’s disease, positive psychology focuses on maintaining and improving one’s well-being.
One particular intervention under this branch of psychology is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction therapy (MBSR). According to Bhatnagar, Phelps, Rietz, Juergens, Russell, Miller, and Ahearn (2013), MBSR is an eight-week long group therapy program that focuses on mindfulness meditation and yoga. The purpose of this group therapy program is to diminish anguish from disorders of mental and physical health and, particularly, to recuperate emotional acceptance (Bhatnagar et al., 2013). Different meditation techniques have shown to be effective in improving stress, health outcomes, and quality of life (Rosenthal, Grosswald, Ross, & Rosenthal, 2011). It explores the positive traits of a person by allowing the person to focus on what being human really is. It teaches self-compassion, which is allowing oneself to be mindful about what being a human really is. It entitles one to be more kind, be at peace with oneself, share that humanity that is within each one of us, and being mindful when recognizing one’s negative aspects (Neff, 2008). For a person to increase their self-esteem one should be more mindful.
Intervention
Mindfulness-based interventions have previously been used to reduce or treat different disorders, such as anxiety and other stress-induced disorders. Hölzel et al. (2011) proposed that mindfulness meditation is effective in its focus on “attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and change in perspective on the self”. The practice of mindfulness meditation is comprised of concentration on the experience of thoughts, sentiments, and body sensations, purely observing these experiences as they appear and allowing them to deteriorate (Hölzel et al., 2011).
Dahm, Meyer, Neff, Kimbrel, Gulliver, and Morissette (2015) explain that mindfulness and self-compassion characterize the way people relate to emotional anguish which, furthermore, effects their functional ability. They go on to explain that self-compassion is comprised of being kind to oneself, being aware of emotional distress, and being able to see suffering as part of a common and shared human experience (Dahm et al., 2015). Therefore, focusing on increasing mindfulness should be able to help significantly increase one’s self-esteem and, in turn, reduce suicide rates caused by this.
As previously mentioned, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) therapy will be applied to adolescents that are at high-risk of committing suicide because of their low self-esteem. MBSR will help reduce the anxiety and stress adolescents have due to their low self-esteem. At the beginning of the intervention, there will be an introduction that will explain what the adolescents should expect. A group of fifteen adolescents between the ages of 13 to 18, who suffer from low self-esteem, are going to be gathered around in a room. In the room, there will be an instructor who will teach them how to mindfully meditate. Mindful meditation will teach the adolescents to become more self-aware, will help them increase their self-love, and teach them to radiate positive emotions around people. This is the start of the intervention and will warm up the adolescents for the next exercise. Once the mindfulness meditation is completed, the adolescents would get a chance to meet one another so that they all are able to feel a connection and bond with each person in the room. This allows them to feel as if these people are a family and will support them. This will help the adolescents get comfortable with one another. When there is tension in a room, it is noticed and things are not going to go smoothly. After everyone gets comfortable with one another, the yoga exercise will commence. The adolescents will be taught how to do yoga for at least ten minutes in the first week. Since it is and eight-week program, by the last week the teenagers would be doing yoga for eighty minutes. The yoga and the meditation, combined, will help the adolescents become aware of their inner thoughts and will allow them to learn to let go of their innermost worries and tribulations. This will, in turn, reduce the stress they feel inside. Suicide ideation will decrease dramatically and self-esteem will increase. By the end of the MBSR group therapy program, the group of adolescents would meet new friends and, moreover, a great support system. By the end of each week, each of the adolescents would get a chance to have a private talk with the therapist. Their progress will be recorded, so the therapist can create a database based on the MBSR treatment. This will help discover how the treatment helped the adolescents and what changes, if any, need to be done in order for the intervention to be more successful.