The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a national mental health emergency.
This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and represents an acceleration of trends observed prior to 2020. Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10-24.
According to the CDC, suicide rates for children 10-24 years has increased by 57.4% between 2007 and 2018, with 6,807 children committing suicide that year. This is shocking. But why? The AAP offers its explanation, that it’s “inextricably tied” to the pandemic and the “ongoing struggle for racial justice.” And its list of demands reflects this.
That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) are joining together to declare a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health. The challenges facing children and adolescents are so widespread that we call on policymakers at all levels of government and advocates for children and adolescents to join us in this declaration and advocate for the following:
- Increase federal funding dedicated to ensuring all families and children, from infancy through adolescence, can access evidence-based mental health screening, diagnosis, and treatment to appropriately address their mental health needs, with particular emphasis on meeting the needs of under-resourced populations.
- Address regulatory challenges and improve access to technology to assure continued availability of telemedicine to provide mental health care to all populations.
- Increase implementation and sustainable funding of effective models of school-based mental health care, including clinical strategies and models for payment.
- Accelerate adoption of effective and financially sustainable models of integrated mental health care in primary care pediatrics, including clinical strategies and models for payment.
- Strengthen emerging efforts to reduce the risk of suicide in children and adolescents through prevention programs in schools, primary care, and community settings.
- Address the ongoing challenges of the acute care needs of children and adolescents, including shortage of beds and emergency room boarding by expanding access to step-down programs from inpatient units, short-stay stabilization units, and community-based response teams.
- Fully fund comprehensive, community-based systems of care that connect families in need of behavioral health services and supports for their child with evidence-based interventions in their home, community or school.
- Promote and pay for trauma-informed care services that support relational health and family resilience.
- Accelerate strategies to address longstanding workforce challenges in child mental health, including innovative training programs, loan repayment, and intensified efforts to recruit underrepresented populations into mental health professions as well as attention to the impact that the public health crisis has had on the well-being of health professionals.
- Advance policies that ensure compliance with and enforcement of mental health parity laws.
Why any child should consider, no less commit, suicide is beyond my comprehension. But obviously some, many, do, and this is an unacceptable and outrageous state of affairs. Not that anyone should care how I feel, but child suicide breaks my heart.
The explanations proffered by the AAP, however, stink of ideology at the expense of the lives of children. They don’t explain suicides before the pandemic and the post-George Floyd wave of catastrophizing “racial justice.” In 2015, there were 5,515 child suicides, and they had nothing to do with it. How dare pediatricians care more about woke excuses than the lives of children, than their mental health, than their killing themselves? How dare they demand the usual litany of facile fixes rather than figure out why this is happening and find real solutions to this nightmare? How dare they care so little about children.
I don’t know why childhood suicides are happening. I have concerns about the constant pessimism, the pervasive nihilism, that I see from young people on social media. The sky is falling, the world is ending, everything is horrible and everything is getting worse. Every problem is catastrophic and there is no solution cannot be the message we send our children and expect them to be hopeful about their life and future. Is this part of it? I don’t know, but I believe that it surely doesn’t help. Children are entering a world where misery is validated and victimhood applauded. This cannot be healthy for children and other living things.
I don’t know whether including this helps, but it doesn’t hurt.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
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The really sad part about the ideology obscuring the science is that if a prominent politician on either side lost a child this way there would be wags on the other side with no sympathy for their loss. One of my granddaughters was hospitalized for depression when she was 16 but thankfully seems to be coping now. Losing a child is supposedly the most traumatic event an adult can face. I have read articles about how even wearing masks changes how we can’t tell the tone of what other kids mean when they tell a joke. Was it joking or was it mean? Teen angst multiplied.
Aside from suicide, there seems to be an epidemic of depression and anxiety with young people as well. I don’t know why, but I am very seriously worried that in our efforts not to stigmatize mental illness, we’re valorizing it instead.
“Suffie Awards.”
I often wonder whether people pretend to be mentally ill, addicted or suffering some trauma on social media just for the validation rush they get.
Can you tell the difference between someone pretending to be mentally ill and someone who is mentally ill? Does it matter? People are killing themselves. We can worry about spotting the fakes later, if there are such things.
You should have stuck to “I don’t know” rather than this take, or your pondering of nihilism and pessimism, as if anything were so simple. You’re such an ideologue sometimes. Thanks for caring.
When you grow up PK, you’ll understand why a pervasive atmosphere of wallowing in misery negatively feeds into those prone to or suffering from depression and anxiety.
Every individual who commits suicide does so for his own reason, but the social climate affects everyone. It can be better or worse. It matters.
It’s not just a matter of spotting fakes.
The pervasive atmosphere — zeitgeist (which in this context, is perhaps to much on the head) — is something to be concerned about.
Pretty sure that Scott is right on this one. And my own response to that is that all of us should probably be thinking of that, and doing our part to make the world a better place.
I’d put a smiley face here, but I know Scott isn’t fond of emojis.
Could it be the trend to tell one group of kids that they are doomed a life of deprivation and helplessness with nothing they can do to ever improve their situation while telling another that they are the root of all evil in the world, even things that happened centuries ago, and therefore should consider themselves worthless?
Had I been raised under either of those conditions I would probably have pulled the trigger myself.
Thinking on this more, it wasn’t that many years ago that this type of thing was (rightfully, imo) considered a form of abuse and treated as such. It might be a tactic parents use in the fight against it being forced on their kids. Report it as verbal and emotional abuse, especially at the elementary level, and use the system against itself.
Your suspicions are accurate in at least some cases. I’ve battled life long depression and right now am in my mid 40’s. The last time I ended up in a mental hospital with life-threatening depression, too much exposure to online third-wave feminism absolutely played a part. It wasn’t the only cause, but it exacerbated a serious problem I already had. And this stuff isn’t new; I was encountering the -isms and -phobias and the “if you disagree with the Narrative there is something fundamentally wrong with you” back in high school.
I haven’t a doubt in my mind that intersectionalism and all the various Critical Theories are killing people and making many others utterly miserable.
I feel you, spent many an evening looking at the gun trying to think of reasons. Thankfully I managed to stay out of the radar of the mental “health” industry. Finally “grew” out of it, mostly.
It is no joke and what society is doing to people who struggle is criminal. We really need to find a better path than the one the country is heading down right now.
To everyone, If you are in the dark places hold on. Tomorrow can’t be better if there is no tomorrow.
Scott,
sorry for the rabbit hole.
There is no rabbit hole when it comes to something like this, LY.
Since we’re sharing, I feel like I lost so much time feeding and doubting my depression. So many opportunities squandered and wasted. It hurts to hear that others suffered in silence like I did.
I hope you’re doing better, LY. You don’t need to suffer so much if you find yourself down that path again. Go ask for help when you need it, please. There are people who care and who don’t want you to feel that way.
As for the path forward, I have my own ideas, but no one else likes them. Woe is me. All the world’s a stage and every person a player in it with a role to play, and mine is a sad one.
At a minimum, I’m going to get sensitive every time Pops raises this subject and mucks it up by talking about “fakers”. As if someone who fakes being depressed on the internet for points is well.
About the “fakers,” there are people who fake being black, fake being queer, fake being whatever is fashionable. It may be that they also suffer from depression, but some depression is entirely ordinary and part of the human condition rather than mental illness. Even cowgirls get the blues.
People want and need validation, and will go do strange lengths to receive it, particularly when there’s little cost involved. To proclaim you suffer from depression today on social media carries less stigma than claiming you got a bad haircut. There’s little downside, at least for the moment, and particularly within a certain circle of friends, so it may not mean anything.
Or it may, and that’s the problem. How do we know when friends really need help for depression and anxiety when everyone claims to be suffering? Make something too ubiquitous and we grow inured, even callous in our pretend empathetic reaction to what might be pretend or might be real cry for help? Mental illness is real and terrible. It should never be turned into a fashion trend.
Yes, there is no “valor” to be stolen because depression is not glorious and there’s no red badge of courage to be earned by going through it. Maybe if we could all be completely honest about how we’ve felt and what we feel with each other, this wouldn’t be as big an issue, but I’ve heard discretion is also important, so I don’t recommend throwing the floodgates open. And yet some are motivated to don the scarlet letter without the shame and suffering anyway. So be it.
If you want someone to open up and tell you things, it’s best not to accuse them of lying to you about something you can’t disprove. Some of them prove they aren’t lying by killing themselves, and some of them don’t say anything at all. The only way to tell is by talking it out, which might not be possible if the person is committed to the lie. For the groundlings, the lie could be that a depressed person is doing fine just as much as the reverse.
You can read German, but you don’t understand how the enigma works, so it’s all code to you. To break the code, you’d want more data and not less. Then you can work on determining signal from noise. You’ve got your order of operations backwards.
As I see social media as a mistake, I’d suggest you spend less time gawking at groups of people trying to glamorize something gross on the internet and more time talking to those around you, which you seem to agree might help. You don’t need to say you care, which I know is sincere, and then immediately remind everyone that some people suck and that you’re distrustful of others. It’s ok to be an emotionally available softy sometimes. It’s in our nature to nurture.
Thanks for letting me discuss this in a little more depth than usual and for putting up with me in general. You’re a good online Pa.
You know those kids who claim they are traumatized and now have PTSD needing puppies, therapy and testing accommodations because they watched 30 seconds of a video of Christina Hoff Sommers? They don’t have PTSD.
There was someone online who twitted that they were one year sober. They got a buncha “likes” and “great job,” etc. I enjoyed a lovely dinner with them a while back, and they had a glass of wine, but that was it. So I privately asked, “are you an alcoholic?” Privately, they replied, “No, I never said I was.” They weren’t quite lying, but they were fishing for the validation.
As a CDL, people lie to me all the time. It’s an occupational hazard to distinguish bullshit.
I hear you on the “everything is horrible and everything is getting worse” thing being hard on mental health and an overload of constant angst, but there’s also another dynamic at play here.
What they’ve done to childhood in the the name of ‘the Children!’ has made it tedious, stupid, and full of bogey men…looking at it from my own childhoods ‘level of freedom’ metric, it looks pretty damn depressing being a kid these days.
Everyone’s so worried about their safety they can’t see what its doing to their sanity.
I think some of what we’re seeing here is, “the helicopters coming home to roost”.
It’s up to parents to teach their children well.
And it is the job of the village to “protect the children” from their evil, deplorable parents.
Terry McAuliffe.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Parents disagreed.
Thankfully
I believe another contributing factor is the increasing shallowness of relationships, which is only exacerbated by the carefully curated Instagram image people are socially pressured to try to project. Who can people talk to at more than a superficial level any more? Who notices when a “friend” who is just one of hundreds stops posting cheery drivel daily, and could benefit from a real conversation?
There’s a real problem, and it’s not just the young who are affected. That being said, my first reaction on reading the AAPI’s list was that it read like a make-work program for therapists and psychiatrists. I don’t see that pumping kids full of Ritalin and Prozac for a few decades has yielded overall positive results, now they want to shift the emphasis back to talk therapy? Or something else entirely?
I think this is a huge factor, the lack of sincere human contact.
If you have no idea why a child would consider suicide, should you be injecting your two cents?
Unfortunately, as I get older I get appointed to more and more mental health cases, and I have learned why children consider suicide.
I get sent to lots of places here in Texas that I do not like
Imagine how much more useful it would have been if someone as knowledgeable as you provided something illuminating rather than being an asshole.
On the other hand, perhaps I, too, know young people with mental health issues, and still don’t have answers. But then, you’re probably very smart.
I’m getting the sense from that final Texas sentence that you don’t know shit, but have an ideological ax to grind, which you’re not going to say because you realize you would get ripped a new asshole for such utter bullshit, as if this was only about marginalized children and that straight white kids never committed suicide.
Enjoy your smug delusions, asshole, and don’t feel at all responsible for kids dying because they are neglected as they don’t fit into the psychotic narratives of scumbags like you.
While your assumption as to the gravamen of the empty insinuation seems likely, I will withhold judgment in case he has anything of substance to offer. Since he knows so much more than me, one would hope he would be so kind as to be modestly informative.
As a smug, delusional asshole I have nothing to offer except to say until you listen you cannot begin to learn.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt, and you still have nothing. Just because someone calls you mean names doesn’t mean you have to prove them right.
Once upon a time a lawyer reached out to those closest to him, and tried to help. No publicity, no greatness, just grunt work. It turned out to be a great life.
Andrew,
Unlike my brethren, I’m going to make a very different assumption, that your problem here, and your defensiveness when challenged to reply with anything substantive, is because you’re talking about your own issues with suicide and this isn’t the “explanation” that you feel, that you want, but you can’t reply substantively without giving away that it’s really about your problems.
You don’t have to respond, but know that if my assumption is correct, that this is really about you, it’s okay and you are allowed to have your own feelings even if they aren’t what anyone else is talking about. You made it harder on yourself by the way in which you tried to deal with it, but that’s understandable as well if this is really about you.
Since 2011, the Obama administration has stressed a heavy emphasis on standardized testing, grades 3-8. There has been more heavily teaching to the tests , with no flexibility for teachers to actually do a relevant and meaningful curriculum. With the Implementation of the common core standards (or as most students and teachers call the common bore), all grades in kindergarten have gotten robotic, monotonous, where everyone across the country (except for red states who pulled out) has to teach almost similarly. The common core standards is not a curriculum but standards which have gotten to be developmentally inappropriate. For example, third graders do not learn cursive writing. They have to focus on test prep. Kindergarten and first grade used to have fine motor skills to help build on writings and cutting. That’s been cut from common core. There’s also no social and emotional skills in the common core standards too.
Students have been suffering due to The overwhelming emphasis of adding higher level standards without actually having the foundation of lower level knowledge and comprehension first.
Oh And not only are students having mental health concerns, teachers and school based are also suffering. That’s the other reason teachers made a mass exodus during the pandemic.
While this may be an issue, does it relate to childhood suicide? Testing has been around long before 2011, and teaching to the test has always been a problem.
Perhaps not relevant, but I coached a lot of “little league” (i.e. not Little League) baseball, and it seemed to me that too many young people really had no one to share their wins and losses, hopes and dreams with. Maybe not “bad” parenting, but little or no sharing. I listened to and shared a lot of all 4. I hope it helped.
I think this is very relevant, that kids are given a million things, material and otherwise, except someone who will talk with them. Perhaps many big problems would never have become big had there been someone to talk to when they were small.
My take? Confusion and lack of safety – but not physical safety. It’s the concept of outsized consequences.
The world’s confusing enough to navigate as a grown adult. Kids are increasingly divorced from sources of support, and entities that can ruin their lives loom over them from every direction. A bad report from a teacher can get your family a visit from the DCS; a loose insult can get you expelled from school. Zero-tolerance policies do more to terrify students and kids than they do insulate them from danger. Education about depression and suicide ideation becomes a public ordeal because they teach it in classroom-sized lots – my little cousin was called on, in class, to explain if he’d ever thought about killing himself during one such session. I’d still be having cold sweats about that if it happened when I was young.
It’s getting easier to tell that everyone has an angle; that kids are shifting from using school as a springboard, to simply trying to survive it. My cousin wanted to be an astronaut when he was six, and shifted that to journalism, and finally now he just says he wants to travel the world. Go anywhere, so long as it’s not here, I translate out of that.
I once joked that the only difference between school and prison when I grew up was that we had worksheets instead of license plates, but with the increasing, omnipresent surveillance and lack of mercy in the educational systems, it’s getting less funny.
So, events between 2007 and 2018 were inextricably linked to a pandemic that began in late 2019. Surely these pediatricians aren’t saying suicidal children caused a viral pandemic, or that racial injustice caused it? Maybe their organization is like the ABA, and has been taken over by irrational quacks. I wouldn’t want to take a sick kid to a doctor who can’t manage basic, rational thought. Maybe they don’t realize the self-portrait they are painting here.
Glad you noticed that the AAP was full of shit.
This is another example of why I have little hope that any of societies issues can be solved in the current environment. As mentioned, even though the linked article never stated it, it left the impression that a disproportionately high number of people of color commit suicide. The linked article goes further stating, “in the US, risks of both depression and suicide are especially high among LGBTQ young people, as well as young people of color.”
Neither of which are true. Not only do White adolescence commit suicide at a disproportionately high rate, excluding AIAN(1) adolescents, they have seen their suicide rates increase at a much higher rate, once again except for AIAN youth. Ignoring that in order to promote the idea that mental health issues among today’s children is the result of “structural racism”, is disingenuous to say the least.
Though there are differences between races and cultures, they should at least be addressing them by being honest about the issue.
2017 suicide rates per 100,000 for adolescence 15-24 (1)(2)
By Sex
Females: 5.8, Males: 22.8
By Race
Females; AIAN: 20.5, White: 6.4, Black: 4.5, Asian: 6.6, Hispanic: 4.2
Males: AIAN: 53.7, White: 27.2, Black: 16.8, Asian: 16.9, Hispanic: 15.6
1) American Indian or Alaska Native
2) Numbers taken from the CDC, “Suicide Rates for Females and Males by Race and Ethnicity: United States, 1999 and 2017”
3) I couldn’t find the CDC report referenced in the Insider article, but the numbers from the NIH Suicide report for 2019 track closely with 2 above so the numbers are a good representation. NIH web site -> Mental Health Information -> Statistics -> Suicide
Or to put it another way, they are increasingly feeling that they’ve been trapped in a no-win life. They’ve lost hope for escaping what’s haunting them into something that they consider to be a good life. One with some predictability and security over the long haul.
And telling them to work harder and lower their standards of living doesn’t get through, not because their expectations are unreasonably high, but because the drop-off involved is even higher. That’s just one factor, given that schools have gotten to treating kids like commodities on a production line, and the pressure to conform overall is less visible than in the get-a-haircut 60s, it’s even more insidious.
I’ve mostly been honoring our host by staying out of his hair, but this is a matter of mental health, not law, and I’ve got a ton of insider knowledge. Not just from experience, but from study, trying to find my way out from the life I’ve been forced to live, and live a better life.
And now, I shall go back to honoring Mr Greenfield, in my own way.
Eek. I’m late to this but a few comments:
1. You’re right about the AAP, Scott. I was thrilled years ago when they issued an advisory to schools that I absolutely agreed with — except that they did not have sufficient hard data/research to support their recommendations. They are trying to pass along their clinical opinions as evidence-based when they are not. Their statements about race fly in the face of 2019 suicide statistics showing that American Indians and white males have the highest suicide rates.
2. As to the main question about why suicide rates may be up: talking about age 10-24 as a group is not helpful at all, although that’s how the CDC and mortality data group things. Are youth at all ages showing increased rates? Is it only older teens? High school grads? College grads? Does it vary by race? I think we need to break the data down by developmental age/life stage or school stage as well as other demographics so we stand a chance of figuring out where the increase is and what it might be due to. If I had to speculate wildly, though, my guesses:
— Untreated depression and alcoholism in First Nation
— Lack of physical exercise (Ken Pope has a recap of meta-analyses on the effects of exercise)
— Lack of in-person socialization opportunities since the pandemic started
— Online bullying or shaming: as more kids spend more times online due to pandemic, has this increased? If so, that would be a factor increasing suicide rates.
— lack of accommodations for school work that the kids would be getting in school makes school work and homework more frustrating now. Relatedly: parents were under increased stress when asked to help their kids more with school work or homework, which may have lead to more verbal abuse/denigration of kids, neglect, or abuse– and more resulting depression in kids.
— lack of special education remediation/rehabilitation services leave young students lagging behind peers
— everything in life is social — kids who cannot develop friendships during the pandemic via virtual means may be more likely to experience increased depression
— lack of opportunities for high school grads to go away to colleges due to the pandemic, so stuck at home (both kids and parents might experience increased depression/stress from that).
— lack of job opportunities for college grads due to pandemiic
But again, that’s just speculation on my part. I’ll shut up now. 🙂
You raise excellent points, and since this is a truly important subject, thanks for doing so.
This something that I have been aware of and leads to me to believe that 21st century parenting is harming out children. Their mental health is suffering and suicide is the just the obvious symptom. I have a guess as to the reason but it is only a guess.
Kids need to learn to overcome adversity. Too many parents try to remove all obstacles and dangers. When problems happen, children are supposed to tattle and/or let some adult solve the problem for them. Adults tell them words are violence instead of “words will never hurt me.” People need coping skills and childhood is the time to learn them. My kids have had to overcome many issues and I think that is a good thing.
Depression is awful and dangerous. If you neither you nor your friends know how to deal with hard times, it can be deadly. I was fortunate to have help when I needed it or I would not be here typing.
Others have mentioned parenting/mentoring, but from what I’ve seen a lot of parents and would-be mentors today, even more than when I was a teenager a little over a decade ago, seem to respond to kids’ immaturity, unrealistic fantasies of the future, depression/emotional issues, social problems, education issues, drug/sex related issues, and whatever else with a borderline-blase “Well, they’ll grow out of it, kids are like that; I grew out of it, they will too.” The issue is that to grow out of something, you need something to grow into, and this might be a generational divide between the teenagers of today and the 40- and 50-somethings adopting this attitude. It’s increasingly difficult for kids to set short-term and medium-term realistic, attainable goals, and social media has played a big part in making everything (sex, wealth, college, dating, influencer status, etc) into a fantasy well outside the median 16 or 17 year-old’s locus of control, while the guiderails for “how to become middle class/stay middle class/etc” that people born in the 60s and 70s relied upon to “grow out of it” have become increasingly arbitrary and inscrutable. So the kids have nothing to grow into, and if it doesn’t seem like they’re one of the lucky ones whose social media-fueled fantasies become true, they grow depressed and/or indulge in cheap thrill-seeking if they can in order to avoid depression.
But I feel for the parents and would-be mentors: what do you say when a 16 year-old girl tells you, “I want to be a make-up influencer on YouTube”? A lot of the 40- and 50-somethings who are the right age to mentor teenagers don’t even know what that is, and they don’t want to crush a kid’s dreams, because they remember having big dreams when they were that age as well, plus many adults don’t know what realistic advice to give kids on how to resolve their social/emotional/goal-related issues.
Having kicked around on the internets since the 90’s, I’ve noticed that there is a slight trend towards normalising (a word I hate) presenting suicide as performative victimhood online, meshing with the “words are literally violence” narrative. This is a hell of a shit narrative to push anywhere near young people in distress. Presenting even the idea that the only way to be heard is to kill yourself is an act of extreme wickedness, but it’s out there.
Greta-ism. Someone close to me has believed that the world is going to end within the next 3 years for the last 6 years. It is a path to the Rabbit Hole.
Where to start.
My cousin killed himself in 2014, age 20. Exactly one month later to the day, his sister killed herself too, age 22. If it matters, we all grew up in the same house, just like siblings, and were very close. I knew they had mental health problems, but it was like, who doesn’t? That was normal. No one in the family saw either of their deaths coming.
About a year ago, my brother arrived home after an evening of hanging out with friends to find that one of his best friends, who had a key to his place, had hung himself in one of the bedroom closets.
I also recall hearing that two young men I went to school with killed themselves a few years ago when we were in our early 20s, one by hanging and I’m not sure about the other.
I grew up working class and my cousins and I all had a good, secure home life for the most part, and loving parents. I recall that when we were in our teens, other kids at school started talking about mental health problems and how they “hated being alive.” Though I did not realize this overtly at the time, I started to pick up on this new dynamic where your mental health problems were like your identity. We romanticized mental anguish. I remember being at a party at a house in a more affluent neighborhood once, during one of the summers I spent with my…somewhat wayward father, who was in jail at the time, and I was talking to some girl who was telling me about how strict her parents were, and she asked me about mine. I told her they weren’t really, that my mother trusted me. I didn’t mention my dad. The girl sort of scoffed and said, “Okay. So you didn’t have a traumatic childhood.”
That was the first time I heard anyone refer to their childhood/adolescence as having been “traumatic”, but I continued hearing it, over and over again, from my peers early in adulthood, many of whom reported having PTSD. At the time, I had only ever heard of PTSD in the context of military veterans, so I thought this was dumb, although out of social politeness I refrained from saying so. My stepfather was a military veteran who had been drafted into the Vietnam War at the age of 20 — around the same age my peers and I were at the time — and interestingly enough, he did not seem to suffer from PTSD. I remember thinking: “Wow, he must have been like, REALLY resilient.”
I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon. I think my generation tends to think about being happy and satisfied all the time as something that’s just normal, and struggling or experiencing negative emotions, even just from suffering the usual slings and arrows of life, is a problem that requires medication and doctors. Also we all seemed so taken by this idea that mental health problems made you more interesting, or more deep, or something.
Our parents, the latchkey kid generation, cooped us up indoors and we had family protocols about stranger danger and all that. The world seemed incredibly dangerous growing up, and we were always on a short leash. I saw almost a whole episode of America’s Most Wanted once, when I was around 7 years old, and had terrible nightmares about it for weeks afterward. Home was like this sanctuary, this safety nest. To this day, it seems like by and large we always want to call our parents immediately for help when we encounter any problem.
As we entered adulthood and started working the usual retail jobs and filing into community college or wherever, there was this pervasive sense of despair and glorification of dysfunction, like it was good or funny to simply fail to develop the normal life skills that adults are expected to have. By the time I was 21 or 22, a lot of the people I grew up with had succeeded so well in this direction that they had criminal records. I remember I started getting weird looks from people around my age when I told them I had never been arrested before. “Not even once?” they would ask, astonished, and then laugh when I confirmed this. One person even got up and left the room to go tell someone else about this very amusing news. I suspect that this was because of the neighborhood I grew up in, though, and is probably not the norm outside of similar neighborhoods to mine.
For some reason, everything always seemed so sour from the start, when they should have seemed bright and hopeful. The ivy league kids were graduating from their ivy league universities and not getting jobs. This was very discouraging to me, personally, and made even trying to go back to school (after completing my first semester of college and then failing to re-enroll because it didn’t seem like there was any point) seem, once again, pointless. Meanwhile, a lot of people my age were getting out of their dead-end retail jobs by “running illegals” or drugs, or doing other types of “victimless crimes” for money.
I didn’t understand at the time that a lot of ivy league kids weren’t getting jobs because so many of them were getting their degree in like, lesbian interpretative dance or whatever. It just seemed like life was going to suck, and those of us who were poor were going to stay poor, and that was going to be it. We would never get to move up from these awful wage jobs everyone hates. This seemed especially grueling to me, which I didn’t understand at all. Why couldn’t I resign myself to working a cash register? It was not difficult, but I spent my nights and my days off dreading my next shift, which always seemed endless. My grandmother said this was because I was indolent and entitled and no better than I am. I also started noticing increasingly that whenever I interacted with anyone “outside my class” they tended to speak to me in this certain voice, like I was a child. Like I was stupid. Like they had to conversationally hold my hand, to accommodate my unintelligence. Eventually, I realized they weren’t trying to be belittle me. They just genuinely thought they were meeting me on a level I would be able to operate on. I never experienced suicidal ideation or anything, but reflecting on this genuinely did make me wish I could get out of my life.
And now it seems like everyone is living on the edge all the time no matter their life circumstances. Automation is happening and everyone is talking about how it’s going to eat up even the skilled job market very soon, and how we need a new system, like universal basic income, which I think is a bad idea. But I do know someone who recently had a surgery that was performed by a robot, and little things like that do make the common prophecy about the looming economic catastrophe feel somewhat more plausible and impending.
Every job market other than retail is saturated and there is no room anywhere else you look, and yet I know people with full-time jobs in retail who are homeless or living in their car or, at best, a camper. Many, many people my age have given up altogether on the idea of ever owning a home. I have a kid who started school this year (a year late, because the pandemic closed all local schools last year and trying to have him do kindergarten on a computer seemed like a bad idea) and I am just beginning to realize the sheer amount of resources that are required to ensure each generation of kids will become basically literate and functional, and what exactly that means for us on an individual level, and how it feels to live in a community that has invested in you but to which being able to give back anything feels insurmountable. Consequently, it’s hard to feel like anything other than a resource drain. And not to politicize this or anything, but I feel like as a woman and a mother I get away with this much more easily than men my age can. I look at my brothers from my position of relative security that feels so undeserved to me, and I see them staggering beneath the need to defeat their own sense of panic and alienation and do well and get somewhere, somehow. Our mother and stepdad are both dead, and when I look outward to our leaders — to our bumbling, elderly president and those around him — I only feel more aggrieved, harassed, and worried. The world is changing so fast, the ground is moving beneath our feet, and for me it feels impossible to raise myself to the scale of whatever must be around the corner. It seems all out of proportion to my dimensions, and I constantly feel myself straining at the limits of my own knowledge, unable to move in any direction.
For what it’s worth, I read your blog partly because you do not seem disoriented. It’s nice to know there are smart, practical, capable people in the world who cannot be fooled by the confusion and who simply do not lose their bearings in spite of whatever hysteria may come sweeping through the culture and carrying off everyone’s sanity all at once.
Anyway, I hope that helps shed some light on what’s eating my generation. As someone who grew up alongside an alarming amount of people who ended up killing themselves, I think you’ve made a valid point here. Unfortunately, you can’t be in every single line of work, and no one can force the people who work in pediatric mental health to read your blog.
Thank you, Nora. I learned a lot from your comment. It’s illuminating comments like yours that make this really worthwhile.