Where does stress really come from? A few weeks ago, I overheard some Year 11 students talking to one another about how stressed they were all feeling. I asked if they wanted to talk about what they’d been saying in more depth. Some barely verbal sign of assent given, I tried to get them to drill down to what, exactly, was the source of their stress.

Was it workload from me? No. Was it pressure that they felt from the school more generally? No, it wasn’t school.

Was it that their parents were loading on to them the weight of great expectation? No, they all agreed that their parents were being pretty good about helping them manage workload. Peer pressure then? No. Everyone was doing their best to be supportive.

“So, you’re not feeling stress because of teachers, or the school, or from your friends or your parents - where is it coming from?”

Their answer? It’s just there, in the air around them; an inescapable atmosphere.

Foundations shaken

From my background of writing on theology and philosophy, this “invisible force” of anxiety made me think of the idea of “the big Other” explored by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Put simply, the big Other is about the systems we are immersed in. When one of Stalin’s heavies says to his latest victim, “hey, I’d love for your subversive poetry to be read widely but The Party says you have to go to the Gulag, so I’m sorry, I don’t have a choice”, he is functioning under a big Other. There is no name to hold responsible, just a force somewhere in “the above” that cannot be argued with.

Oddly, though, because there was no option but blind obedience to this higher force - whether The Party or The Church - life under the traditional big Others of the past century could be less stressful. Now, with the collapse of the USSR and the general decrease in devotion to the grand top-down narratives of faith, there is greater personal liberty, but with this comes a huge increase in personal responsibility because the old regulations telling us exactly what we ought to do have been stripped away.

The increased stress of this great freedom was beautifully exemplified recently in an episode of Fleabag, the hit show that is really one big meditation on coping with the anxiety of millennial liberty.

In one of the pivotal scenes of the series, our heroine is in a confession box, drink in hand, on the verge of a breakdown, grieving and yearning, in the throes of despair about her life, young enough to still be a young person while old enough to have found some language to frame her malaise: “I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning, I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to … I think I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”

She whispers to the priest she’s fallen for behind the curtain: “Even though I believe that, scientifically, nothing I do makes any difference, in the end I’m still scared. So just tell me what to do.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better expression of the angst my students feel.

Over the past few generations, so many vertical systems of assurance and security have been dismantled: the promises of religion; the confidence that a bit of hard work will deliver a secure job and a salary to make life comfortable; a syllabus that isn’t constantly shifting, grade boundaries that aren’t unexpectedly inflating; a planet that, despite our own instabilities, is a bedrock beneath our feet that will remain unchanged. All of these once stable foundations have been shaken.

Yet the final message of Fleabag is not that she truly wants to return to these constraints. Her cry may be one of nostalgia for a simpler world, but it is also one of recognition that the loss of traditional big Other systems is ultimately a good thing, because without this loss, we remain bound to top-down patriarchal arrangements of the world that are, in the end, oppressive to human flourishing.

However, what makes life more complicated is that the deconstruction of higher authorities has not rid us of the power of the big Other. As the Belgian professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis Paul Verhaeghe argues (Transference Anxiety and the Failure of Our Fathers, 2016), it has been replaced by the horizontal pressure of social media. “During patriarchy,” he writes, “we identified with the dos and don’ts of the father. Today, we identify with the likes and don’t likes of Big Brother.” While vertical obedience to the Pope - the “papa”, the authority father figure - has been eroded, this has been replaced by a perceived need to please the horizontal web of Big Brother, leading, he argues, to an increase in depression and shame.

What, then, to say to my students? How should schools respond to the very real mental health issues so many of them are facing?

First, knowledge is power. I explained to them this idea of the big Other, this unnameable, all-surrounding system that demands our obedience and how it has shifted from the vertical to horizontal.

We took our time talking about it, and they said in days that followed that it had been helpful simply to become aware. When they felt stressed, they were able to understand that it was something far bigger than them and thus not their fault, not a failing on their part. This allowed them to take practical steps in terms of responses to social media and conversations with family, and many reported feeling much more relaxed about their situation.

Second, I firmly believe that education should not offer illusions. We are in the business of taking children on a journey into adulthood and equipping them with the skills to face the reality of their lives. Where, in the past, that might have meant support for certain religious claims or promises of taking places in society they have may previously have felt entitled to by the luck of their birth, we are now given the challenge of education in the face of the collapse of these “big stories”. This is a tough new challenge for schools but one that we must face up to if we are to serve our students properly. It may even be one that requires more teachers to have professional development in psychotherapeutic practices.

A new normal

Stress and anxiety are, sadly, a new normal for many of our students. Understanding where this springs from is vital. There are no simple answers or easy solutions. Yet, in Fleabag’s star, what we see is hope: a model of understanding and acceptance. Moving into adulthood and radical personal responsibility for her liberty was a journey that took her to a place of huge anxiety.

But her great gift to viewers - and, via these lessons, to age-appropriate messages to our students, too - could be that it is perfectly natural to be feeling anxious about the future because, with the loss of so many grand narratives, the world is a less certain place for all of us. That loss is not a matter of personal failure; it is, on the positive flip side, an opportunity for a more equal and genuinely transformative future.

Kester Brewin teaches maths in south-east London. While working as a teacher, he has been a consultant for BBC Education, and is the author of a number of books on culture and religion. He tweets @kesterbrewin

This article originally appeared in the 17 May 2019 issue under the headline “Their minds are on ‘Other’ things”