The Psychology of Youth Mental Health | Ross Szabo

Michael Gervais (0:00)

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Ross Szabo (1:13)

Even in my senior year of high school is when I attempted to take my own life after kind of four or five months of crippling depression. Even when that happened, president of my class, varsity basketball player, member of every like volunteer organization possible, high GPA for my parents on the outside, well, he looks like everything's fine.

Michael Gervais (1:33)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. Today's guest is Ross Szabo, one of the leading voices in youth mental health education. He's the founding wellness director at Geffen Academy at UCLA. He's founder of Human Power Project and co-author of Behind Happy Faces. And he's also the author of A Kids Book About Anxiety.

Ross Szabo (1:59)

Where a lot of parents make a mistake is they focus so heavily on is their kid academically prepared for college that they forget that they may not have the actual skills they need to navigate the different challenges they're gonna experience interpersonally versus academically.

Michael Gervais (2:13)

We explore why so many young people are struggling, why parents sometimes miss the signs and how we can help kids build the language and the skills to understand what they're experiencing before they reach a crisis point.

Ross Szabo (2:26)

The mental health crisis is equally difficult in everyone, but it comes out differently in different genders.

There's a bigger stigma for young men to share their feelings or to talk about it. Then if you have that vacuum, you're gonna fill it with the manosphere and all these other things that aren't supporting them. We're not filling the vacuum with meaningful things that can support them.

Michael Gervais (2:46)

So with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Ross Szabo. Ross, we've been able to hang out. We've had some lunches and a bunch of conversations. And I'm excited to be able to sit down and have a conversation about your life efforts and what you're bringing to this world. But before we get into that, what do you hope that the listener or viewer will take from our conversation today?

Ross Szabo (3:14)

I really hope that people understand that mental health isn't a talking point and that we can actually have clarity around it. We hear that mental health is like physical health all the time, but you actually need to do things to make that happen. And there is so much confusion out there now. It's like we've stopped just using emotional words, and everyone now has anxiety, and everyone has depression, but not everyone actually has anxiety and depression. And so I really hope this conversation just adds the clarity that people need so that they can understand mental health the same way they do physical health.

Michael Gervais (3:42)

Amen. And we're living in a stigma.

If you grew up in my family, in my neighborhood, in my sport ecosystem when I was younger, you would not go seek out a psychologist or a therapist to help you with your mental health.

And the taboo was too rich, it was too strong. So I actually, that's how I got into the field, is I needed it. And I needed to figure out how to work in the shadows of it. So I studied it, which I think was great. It really worked for me until somebody in my academic career said, hey, the intellectual understanding of the psychology of being a great human, quote unquote, great, you actually need to go do the work. You need to sit in a chair. You need to go do this work and have somebody hold you accountable so that the work is honest. And I was like, oh, okay. So that's when I realized there was an exponential difference between studying it, intellectualizing it, and practicing and training the building of the skills. Okay, so I think we're going to vibe on the same way, what is your origin story of why you wanted to dedicate your life to mental health?