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This new world has taken a toll on U.S. teenagers, if the staggering data on adolescent mental health are any indication. In 2020, 16% of U.S. kids ages 12 to 17 had anxiety, depression, or both, a roughly 33% increase since 2016.
The following year, 42% of U.S. high school students said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, 29% reported experiencing poor mental health, 22% had seriously considered suicide, and 10% had attempted suicide.
In other words, life in a #1 Western world paradise ...
Why kids are so depressed? They seem to have everything. Life is surely much easier than 50 years ago. More freedom to express themselves, every gadget imaginable, way less parental control, way less discipline, better access to mental health, counselors and institutions... They are well fed, well dressed, full of life choices.
Are they having too good?? Not enough attention? Is TikTok not fulfilling their lives?
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the article indicates one area that we've coddled, rather than educate our youth...
Adults shouldn’t disregard our feelings because we go through things as well.
"Sometimes at school, I'll get bullied just for who I hang out with, who I'm friends with.
"I used to feel safe at school,
I keep getting anxious from time to time. It’s like I’m not able to trust anybody at this point.’
"What worries me most is how every generation believes that they’re going to be the last. They do very little for the coming generations,
I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy. I wouldn’t say I’m sad. I am just confused right now.
“It’s not just one issue around the world that can [explain], ‘Oh, this is why this person’s feeling this.’”
"I hold myself to a high expectation, being the oldest of three brothers. Sometimes it can be really overwhelming.
I tried to convince myself that I was fine.
"Adults try to make your problems almost disappear.... They're not letting me feel how I want to feel."
found the courage to tell kids who tease him exactly how they make him feel.
"You can get depression from a lot of things. If a kid feels sad or depressed, I think they should talk to someone about it.
We've built an entire psychology sector on elevating and validating Feelings, without thought or acknowledgment of the root cause and cure for fickle Feelings (Which can change by the minute.)
yes, Feelings are important, until they become conrolling in your life, rather than you understanding and controlling your Feelings to work to your awareness and advantage, not to your demise and destruction of your quality of life, by your CHOICE of how you process Feelings..
I'm sure those 18 yo's who stormed Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima (or Gaza) had valid Feelings.
But life is on a different trajectory than your current Feelings.
Equip your youth to understand to use their Feelings as a vehicle for change, rather than a burden of Truth (of which Feelings are not)
Those of us who've BTDT, were not deterred by our Feelings. or... we would have never arrived / overcome our struggles.
Life is a struggle, and a serious one for many, if not most.
There can be victory over Feelings that supress us (by our choice).
I too am very alarmed at current spike in student (especially college) suicides. It truly is about the EASIEST period of your life. Many choices and options and few 'real' or burdensome responsibilities. Apparently youth are not having enough FUN to see through the percieved challenges.
I was so happy to be free of Dairy Farm Boarding School by age 15... life has been a picnic ever since. A very challenging picnic being the primary caregiver for a disabled parent from the moment I turned 18 to age 50+. The dreams were lost / gone / ka put. Feelings, yes I had feelings (very painful ones)... but I had a higher duty that could not be deferred. Every step was just plodding through my situation. Few were elated leaps of happiness. Most steps were climbing insurmountable barriers. Day-in-day-out, year-in, year-out. And the surprises were usually crisis. Unknown and inexpected, and certainly undesired! Not at all the burden faced at Omaha Beach, or today in Gaza and Ukraine. (and many other places)
Last edited by StealthRabbit; 10-11-2023 at 05:54 AM..
One problem within the English language is how we use the word 'Depression'.
A person may feel depressed, or worried, or anxious, but that is NOT 'depression'.
This confusion effected me. I always thought I knew what depression was, as a result, I had the attitude that if someone has depression they just need to focus on something that makes them happy. Or maybe they need an ice cream treat. Or to hear a good joke.
Then while undergoing treatment for cancer a side effect was depression. It hit me hard and I needed an antidepressant. The experience of actual depression was totally different from what I had thought depression was. Fortunately, after my cancer treatment was over my depression lifted and I was able to function without further need of antidepressants.
I look back at that episode in my life as a learning event.
I agree that there does seem to be a problem in our society when young people are dealing with anxiety, sadness, and hopelessness.
Our society stands as a shining example of hope and the 'American Dream' as evidenced by the streams of refugees who go to great lengths to come here, often doing so illegally if they see no other legal options.
I think one thing we all need to do is re-evaluate the things needed for a good life with news like this. The standard model to date was income, health, education, and pursuit of happiness. We've achieved those more than ever before, yet there's still glaring holes where many people are not achieving a good life and being crippled by mental health problems.
On anxiety, I believe this status quo of maximizing achievement is as detrimental as it is helpful. About the other emotions, those may have different roots. Social connection is a big deal with all of them. I wish there was more focus on that and less focus on box checking - which gets in the way of just hanging out and establishing friendships. There was an article in the Atlantic looking at the way kids build friendships and the way adults do, and the conclusion was adults have put themselves in so many constraints - that if they behaved more like kids and just hung out, connections would establish easier.
Addressing societal discrepancies and safety nets will help some of the issues, but they won't solve it all. People's mindsets are as important or more important than anything society does. People have always thrived despite hardship. What's really changed in the last 200 years is a complete collapse of spirituality and greater world connection. Throughout any practice, there was a lot of wisdom around dealing with hardship, grief, fulfillment, self sacrifice etc... as people dropped ideas due to the religious overlays and dogma on top of spirituality, they lost all this as well. One need to only look at the Soviet Union to see the caustic effects spiritual sterilization. Russia and Eastern Europe are still dealing with the fallout.
Also, there is a debate of actually diagnosing and definitions as to whether these were always there and just not documented. If you look at the old school miners and people that came out west, they had to be in rough shape mentally as well. I wonder how much difference there is between suicidal college people today and people of that same age that took risks back in the day that were essentially suicidal. How much difference is there between the addict and the gunslinger?
In summary, I don't think it's a simple cause like social media or really even a new problem. I think we do need to come up with a better roadmap to address all of life's issues and fulfillment.
Lately I have met a bunch of young adults who claim to be 'neurodivergent'.
They tell me about a wide array of self-diagnosed ailments like ADHD, autistic spectrum, narcolepsy, and gender dysphoria [good lord never let them hear you suggest that it is gender dysphoria]. It is often wrapped up in a cocoon of victimhood. They insist they are victims of something, though after spending time with them and trying to understand what is going on with them, it seems to be an intricate web of self-diagnosed 'neurodivergent' mental ailments.
I do not mean for this to sound unsympathetic. I have anguished over some of these relationships as I wish I could help them.
Twice I have been diagnosed by mental health professionals as having a specific disorder, though it is a disorder that I am fine with, it does not 'bother' me and I am not a danger to myself. To me, if someone truly has blah mental disorder, and if it is wrecking their life, they need to seek help from the professionals and try to get it fixed.
When I was hit with depression, I told my doctor, they said that it was to be expected given the cancer drugs I was taking, and the doctor gave me an antidepressant. Which soon helped.
In my mind, anyone who has a crippling mental disorder needs to seek professional help.
But falling for victimhood is not going to help any of them.
I think victimhood is becoming the new method of virtue signaling.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-11-2023 at 06:49 PM..
Reason: Typo. You meant cocoon.
It's been weird to see a certain social shift from the vibe I felt when I was a teenager in the 1990s to what came after that, and after that. Even within the subculture of "goth" (and yeah, I know, that's a small fringe set of people but humor me, hear me out on this)... In the 90s there was a certain very adult nihilism and joyful darkness to it. Teens of that time did not feel like children. If we wanted to go somewhere, we walked. If we wanted to get something, we found a way. Sure some of us were wild and reckless but I don't remember feeling like the other teens in my high school were helpless or emotionally fragile. Maybe some of them were but put up a convincing front, or "mask." But we did not have school shootings or as high a rate of suicides going on. And it was before most people had access to cell phones or the internet. Heck, if you had a pager they thought you were a drug dealer! lol
But the youth that was rebelling, doing the sex, drugs and rock & roll thing...we acted tough, we had pretty thick skins. It was a time before the vampires sparkled, man! Remember The Crow? He had feelings, and then he went out and kicked butts!
But when I transitioned into young adulthood I started seeing the younger people coming up into some of my social groups embrace this "emo" thing. Suddenly they were bebbies. Cute widdle hewlpliss bebbehs. With dyed black swoopy haircuts and tons of eyeliner and a pacifier for some reason. It creeped me out, honestly. And ever since that time, I've seen the teens and young adults...not all, but a significant portion...seem just more fragile, helpless, scared of the world, hopeless, and unhappy. They don't feel empowered to do much of anything, except occasionally when they're crusading on behalf of their outrage du jour. They rail against everything that expects anything of them...from school, to capitalism, to dating.
What happened? Well I stand by my thought that the internet and all the ways it has taken over life, cell phones and so on, has been the biggest shift from then to now. There's a certain disconnect from reality in that. But also, 9/11 and since then an endless parade of shocking and horrifying death and destruction, constant bombardment with the news that the planet is burning, disaster after disaster, Covid...whatever one believes about it, the events of 2020 affected most people in some ways... God, 2020. It felt like we were chucked into a parallel universe where nothing even made sense. Tiger King, WHY NOT? Hell at this point I'm surprised we haven't elected him President.
Student loans have been a burden carried by these kids' parents, who are still probably dealing with them, but more significantly is the cost of housing. When I was 18, it was possible for me to pay rent on my minimum wage job. Now you can't even qualify to rent anything in a lot of places on one full time minimum wage job, and it might be a struggle with two. Thanks to REITs buying up real estate like crazy and using third party software to crank up rents and squeeze renters for every penny they can. Forget starting a family, childcare may also cost more than you make. And half the government wants to eliminate all social safety nets and hell, destroy the whole government while we're at it, why not? Guess if you struggle to make it, you can go beg at a church and they'll all give you lots of thoughts and prayers but no one is going to put you up for the night.
So yeah, the young people...I don't know if they are alright. And I also feel like they have cause to feel kinda despondent.
As for gender dysphoria... I'm sure it's very real and exactly as stated in some of the cases. But I also believe there are probably some where a person just knows that what they are dealing with from their perspective is painful and miserable, and they think that probably the grass has got to be greener on the other side of the gender fence. And, too, at least a few cases I've known of where someone was just reaching out heart and soul for people to give them hope of some kind, a little bit of positive affirmation or camaraderie, and they found it in a completely different identity on the internet and decided to try and become that person. I think that it is complicated. And various possible psychological or physical explanations don't render it invalid.
I actually think that a lot of the neurodivergence stuff...especially ADHD and ASD stuff... Might be amplified by life with the internet. I can tell you as someone who has ADHD that the internet can definitely play a role in the manifestation of it. But I don't like the drugs...tried them, hated them. It isn't that hard for me to find ways to accommodate myself with how I know my brain works, as an adult. It was harder when I was a kid because no one was even diagnosing girls with this then, and if they had, their answer to it would not have been, "just let her discreetly doodle on paper so she can focus on lessons in school" it would have instead been, "drug her into compliance and conformity." Honestly as much as it sucked to struggle and fail because I couldn't make learning LOOK the way teachers thought it should look...I think being drugged would have been worse, just from my experience with the meds. Though I know that they have been life saving for others.
It's been weird to see a certain social shift from the vibe I felt when I was a teenager in the 1990s to what came after that, and after that. Even within the subculture of "goth" (and yeah, I know, that's a small fringe set of people but humor me, hear me out on this)... In the 90s there was a certain very adult nihilism and joyful darkness to it. Teens of that time did not feel like children. If we wanted to go somewhere, we walked. If we wanted to get something, we found a way. Sure some of us were wild and reckless but I don't remember feeling like the other teens in my high school were helpless or emotionally fragile. Maybe some of them were but put up a convincing front, or "mask." But we did not have school shootings or as high a rate of suicides going on. And it was before most people had access to cell phones or the internet. Heck, if you had a pager they thought you were a drug dealer! lol
But the youth that was rebelling, doing the sex, drugs and rock & roll thing...we acted tough, we had pretty thick skins. It was a time before the vampires sparkled, man! Remember The Crow? He had feelings, and then he went out and kicked butts!
But when I transitioned into young adulthood I started seeing the younger people coming up into some of my social groups embrace this "emo" thing. Suddenly they were bebbies. Cute widdle hewlpliss bebbehs. With dyed black swoopy haircuts and tons of eyeliner and a pacifier for some reason. It creeped me out, honestly. And ever since that time, I've seen the teens and young adults...not all, but a significant portion...seem just more fragile, helpless, scared of the world, hopeless, and unhappy. They don't feel empowered to do much of anything, except occasionally when they're crusading on behalf of their outrage du jour. They rail against everything that expects anything of them...from school, to capitalism, to dating.
What happened? Well I stand by my thought that the internet and all the ways it has taken over life, cell phones and so on, has been the biggest shift from then to now. There's a certain disconnect from reality in that. But also, 9/11 and since then an endless parade of shocking and horrifying death and destruction, constant bombardment with the news that the planet is burning, disaster after disaster, Covid...whatever one believes about it, the events of 2020 affected most people in some ways... God, 2020. It felt like we were chucked into a parallel universe where nothing even made sense. Tiger King, WHY NOT? Hell at this point I'm surprised we haven't elected him President.
Student loans have been a burden carried by these kids' parents, who are still probably dealing with them, but more significantly is the cost of housing. When I was 18, it was possible for me to pay rent on my minimum wage job. Now you can't even qualify to rent anything in a lot of places on one full time minimum wage job, and it might be a struggle with two. Thanks to REITs buying up real estate like crazy and using third party software to crank up rents and squeeze renters for every penny they can. Forget starting a family, childcare may also cost more than you make. And half the government wants to eliminate all social safety nets and hell, destroy the whole government while we're at it, why not? Guess if you struggle to make it, you can go beg at a church and they'll all give you lots of thoughts and prayers but no one is going to put you up for the night.
So yeah, the young people...I don't know if they are alright. And I also feel like they have cause to feel kinda despondent.
As for gender dysphoria... I'm sure it's very real and exactly as stated in some of the cases. But I also believe there are probably some where a person just knows that what they are dealing with from their perspective is painful and miserable, and they think that probably the grass has got to be greener on the other side of the gender fence. And, too, at least a few cases I've known of where someone was just reaching out heart and soul for people to give them hope of some kind, a little bit of positive affirmation or camaraderie, and they found it in a completely different identity on the internet and decided to try and become that person. I think that it is complicated. And various possible psychological or physical explanations don't render it invalid.
I actually think that a lot of the neurodivergence stuff...especially ADHD and ASD stuff... Might be amplified by life with the internet. I can tell you as someone who has ADHD that the internet can definitely play a role in the manifestation of it. But I don't like the drugs...tried them, hated them. It isn't that hard for me to find ways to accommodate myself with how I know my brain works, as an adult. It was harder when I was a kid because no one was even diagnosing girls with this then, and if they had, their answer to it would not have been, "just let her discreetly doodle on paper so she can focus on lessons in school" it would have instead been, "drug her into compliance and conformity." Honestly as much as it sucked to struggle and fail because I couldn't make learning LOOK the way teachers thought it should look...I think being drugged would have been worse, just from my experience with the meds. Though I know that they have been life saving for others.
Thank you, your perspective gives a lot of insight.
I can understand that internet access among children has had an extremely negative effect.
I have read a few articles about the dopamine highs brought on by internet usage. I suspect that drug is having more of a negative impact on our youth than all the Adderall, Concerta, Dexedrine, Evekeo, Focalin, Quillivant, and Ritalin in the world.
We were raising children from 1985 until 2008-ish. The state required that our foster children were all taking the prescribed amphetamines.
With our biological adopted children, when they exhibited the same symptoms we had them walk around the block. My wife called it 'blowing off the stink'.
We homeschooled. If a child can focus for one hour a day with a good curriculum they can stay up with grade-level easily, and once they have mastered the ninth-grade curriculum they are ready to enter college. If 30 minutes into it, they get restless and lose focus it is time for them to go blow off the stink. When they returned home, they were ready to focus on a textbook once again.
But our foster children had a lot more difficulty. Being drugged up all day and confined inside a classroom.
Having observed the effects of confining children on amphetamines, side by side with children not on any drugs. I have to wonder about the effect of all the dopamine from internet access.
What happened? Well I stand by my thought that the internet and all the ways it has taken over life, cell phones and so on, has been the biggest shift from then to now. There's a certain disconnect from reality in that. But also, 9/11 and since then an endless parade of shocking and horrifying death and destruction, constant bombardment with the news that the planet is burning, disaster after disaster, Covid...whatever one believes about it, the events of 2020 affected most people in some ways... God, 2020. It felt like we were chucked into a parallel universe where nothing even made sense. Tiger King, WHY NOT? Hell at this point I'm surprised we haven't elected him President.
Yes 9/11 and 2020 were big deals and traumatic - but they pale in comparison to getting drafted for Vietnam, the cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear holocaust, the great depression, 10s of millions dead in the Spanish flu...
My grandpa was a flamethrower on the Pacific islands in WWII. He never talked about any of the experience ever (outside of that he was convinced he would die in the conflict), he made his kids shoot a dying farm animal, and he wouldn't let any of them play with toy soldiers. That trauma is magnitudes more than most any american experiences today.
If they took the same criteria use in DSM 5 or whatever they are on now and asked people in Americans how depressed or troubled they were in 1934 or even moreso in 1873, those numbers would blow today's numbers out of the water.
There are a lot of people who are not in the ideal mental health state, but what really has changed is the bar of comparison. If people were comparing against the sharecroppers missing teeth and that never left the state, they'd feel good. When todays kids compare themselves against their peers who drive Volvos, attend 35 concerts, and take 3 international trips, they feel like they are in a low bracket.
A lot of young people that report feeling depressed aren't even depressed. I simply don't believe that very many young people at all live existences with literally no bright spots in life, where they are actually devoid of any positive experiences. Like others have mentioned people are just self identifying and slapping labels on themselves to try to bridge reality to perception, to explain why they aren't a specimen human. Reality is actually pretty cushy, perceptions are off kilter.
Read "The Chaos Machine". Talk about sobering. And frightening.
Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for.
And what about mass media in the 4 generations before? That screwed up more people with propaganda and programming than social media does today, especially if you include the USSR and Turkey and places like that.
Social media checking in with what's happening with the Jones's is nothing new. Look at the 1915 newspaper from Dawsonville GA!
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