Oh the Trauma, Oh the Discrimination. How campus counseling centers advance a political narrative.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 19, 2024 | Peter Wood

[karpov]

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) recently issued its 2023 Annual Report. It presents an abundance of dire information about the therapy-addicted young people now trying to make their way through the wasteland of undergraduate education. I have read it so you don’t have to.

But before I turn to its diagnostic particulars, let me indulge with the broader picture that appears nowhere in CCMH’s report. Virtually everyone, including CCMH, agrees that American college students are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. But why?

Among the recent books on the topic is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. That book has garnered considerable attention in light of Haidt’s claim that smartphones, which make social-media connectivity omnipresent in the lives of children, are the root cause of the vast growth in self-reported and diagnosed mental illness in the college-age cohort.

Haidt’s explanation has the merit of matching the chronology. He reports that 2012 “was the first year that a majority of Americans owned a smartphone” and that, “by 2015, two-thirds of teens did too.” That was the period in which “rates of teenage depression, loneliness, self-harm and suicide began to rise sharply.” Smartphones, in his account, amplified the normal anxieties of young people and trapped kids in a world where they were constantly exposed to the dangers of ridicule and ostracism.

[jeffc]

They grew up being afraid to go outside and play. That and helicopter parents...

[AppyPappy]

Now they all have the Autism. They are like Boomers who sit around looking up medical symptoms to have only they want mental health problems.

[spankalib]

constantly exposed to the dangers of ridicule and ostracism.

Reminds me of:

The Purpose Of Political Correctness Is To Humiliate by R. SCOTT CLARK on February 21, 2015 | Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.

To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.

A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. —Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It”

[aquila48]

“I think if you examine political correctness...”

At its essence political correctness is simply a new public etiquette - a set of redefined acceptable behavior.

Whereas traditional etiquette evolved naturally over the years as a way to politely coexist with others, political correctness is a fabricated set of mores and values that the left wants to shove down our throat and that results in the exact opposite of peaceful coexistence.

It’s radicalism at its core, which is the hallmark of the left - blow up the old tested and proven system and replace it with some unproven, untested, harebrained, half baked idea.