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Finding emo: Angst spreading from older teens to middle-schoolers
(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) They're 13, maybe 12, maybe even younger, and this is what they're finding on the Internet:
A girl from Roselle, whose screen name is As the Blood Runs Down, writes that she'll commit suicide by slashing her throat, she'll try 80 times, and she'll leave this as her suicide note: "Now there's simply one less heart to break."
All this on her blog on MySpace, a virtual meeting place for any kid with access to the Internet and the unofficial base for all kids who call themselves "emo," short for hard-core emotive.
It started with a form of indie music _ noted for its whininess and its lead singers who would sob on stage _ back in the 1980s and caught on a couple of years ago with high schoolers drawn to its melodrama and misanthropy.
Now emo is a subculture with a dress and drama all its own. According to kids, teachers, and therapists, it has become the latest cool thing in junior highs, where cool is everything.
Only some grown-ups and even older emo kids themselves worry that young teens and preteens might be in over their heads in a scene that's wrought with self-injury, prescription swapping and long hours venting their dark side on blogs that they forget can be read by anyone.
Someone who calls herself I Am the Happy Emo Girl Named Amaya!, whose bedtime is 9 p.m., by the way, writes in her blog, "i don't know who i am ... why don't you just end it, shoot me with ur gun or some (expletive). Bang. Bang. Im dead."
And then there's Emo Tim, whose blog shows video of his forearm, a lattice of red cuts. These words crawl beneath the blood-blotched arm: "I got a Boo-Boo!"
Ouch.
"I think now we have more kids who are messed up, broken," said Steve Pearce, principal of Margaret Mead Junior High in Elk Grove Village, Ill. "Their heroes are these drug-addicted, strung-out musicians. Emotionally speaking, our kids today, they've seen more, they probably hurt more because of broken homes. They're more needy. More kids today see therapists, they're on medications. This emo (phenomenon) plays along with that."
You can find the ever-more-youthful emo trend in cities and suburbs. And it has spread, thanks to the Internet, faster than you can type, "Seeking desolate landscape populated by preteens."
Check out MySpace _ a virtual hangout where teens glue themselves to the computer and hook up with kids far and wide _ and you'll find some 17,331 groups that identify themselves as "emo."
You can Google "emo" and find step-by-step pictorial guides for "emo makeovers." That is, how to transform a geeky guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear, working at a copy store, to a "bona fide emo boy," who is shown dying his hair black, ditching the smile, slipping on a black T-shirt and scarf and, in the final photo, putting razor blade to wrist, from which something red is spilling.
Psychologists and mental health experts say that in the last few years, especially among teens and preteens, there has been a huge attitudinal swing about mental health issues; whereas 10 years ago a kid might be ashamed to admit even seeing a therapist, now it is ultra-cool to have such mood swings that you are on prescription meds and diagnosed with childhood or adolescent bipolar disorder.
"Now it's almost a rite of passage. `Wow, I'm so messed up, I'm seeing a therapist and this is the drug they put me on,'" said Lisa Schubring, a marriage and family therapist in Green Bay, Wis., whose practice is devoted primarily to teens and preteens with issues related to the computer. "A huge surge of kids are taking anti-psychotic drugs. There's some sort of coolness in, `My moods are so wild, I have to take this.'"
What's most worrisome, she and others report, is that kids are swapping psychiatric prescriptions the way they used to swap Twinkies for chips at the lunch table. If Ritalin works for you, maybe it'll be good for me, the thinking goes.
"When I was in high school, kids crushed up Ritalin, Adderall, you name it. The emo kids were poppin' pills, doin' it all," said an 18-year-old from Hoffman Estates, Ill., who kept a keen eye on the scene and worries that what is now almost a joke among college kids has snared serious attention from 7th graders.
"It's a generation marked by promiscuity and disobedience under wraps," he said of his peers. "It's like the hair in front of their eyes shields the world from seeing the moral breakdown. Under the gentle swoop of the bangs lies a world of debauchery. Each kid tries to outdo each other, in a big game of `who can be the most emo.' It's one of those trying-so-hard-not-to-conform-that-they-all-end-up-looking-the-same situations.
"Apathy is an epidemic. These kids don't have anything to believe in anymore, so they turn to whatever's there. It seems like in these cases, appearance is religion."
So now, at the high altar of cool in junior high, emo is to be worshiped.
Michel Lacocque, a school counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, has been working with 7th graders for much of his professional life. He has a deep and poetic understanding of their whims and their worries.
"This age group _ 12 _ is a time when kids haven't settled on who they are," Lacocque said. "They are trying on personalities like they try on clothes. Things come through their ranks like contagions. They are very permeable. As adults, we know how to hold on to who we are. You feel it, you feel it in your belly.
"They are so in the process of forming themselves still. You're not a defined person when you are 12. It's a trial-and-error, intensely feeling time. Schools need to be clear about their structure, and so do parents. It's reminders that it's 8 o'clock and it's time to go to class. If there's something on your mind, there are counselors and there's a school nurse and you can go to see them.
"We have a group of students who are defining themselves in a certain way, and it won't last. It will pass. I'm not terribly concerned."
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
As the young adolescents thrash around the matter of who they are and who they are in the world, Lacocque advises that the adults around them stay steady and stay the course.
"When the child was 3 and awoke from a nightmare and said there was a monster, if you got scared, there would be terror," he said. "It's contagious. With our children here in school, they say this world is crap, and if we're alarmed, they'd be terrified. We have to remain benign, organized, structured and remind them what's next. Class starts in two minutes."
As for the cutting, or self-injuring, that is one of the most worrisome parts of being emo, according to Lacocque, who has seen the behavior in both middle school and high school students. "There is something sexily eerie about cutting for people who don't feel their reality," he explained. For the most part, he said, some kids might be curious enough to try it once but then quickly decide it's not something they're interested in doing.
The danger, say child psychologists, is the child who decides to dabble once and makes a serious mistake.
"Typically, the intention is not to die," said Schubring. "The risk is always there."
One Schaumburg, Ill., mother of four, a woman who spends plenty of time listening in on preteen and teen conversations, chauffeuring her brood from here to there, is alarmed by how swiftly she has seen the lyrics of emo songs _ like the one from the band Hawthorne Heights with the refrain, "so cut my wrist and black my eyes, so I can fall asleep tonight or die" _ devolve from what she calls "bubblegummy" just a couple years ago to what she now sees as "seriously intense."
"It gets really scary when it's really cool to get yourself hospitalized," said the woman, who asked not to be named.
"And the real concern," she said, "is that you'd hate to see a kid who is depressed, who you blew off as, `Oh that.' And then something really bad happens."
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.
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