Posted on 06/02/2017 7:59:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
More than 36 percent of teenage girls in America are depressed or have suffered a recent major depressive episode, according to a study published in Translational Psychiatry. For boys, the rate is 13.6 percent. What are we doing to the kids?
It isn't just one study. Research throughout the last several decades has shown a consistent pattern of rising anxiety, depression, suicide and suicide attempts among American adolescents. A 2001 paper published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that the suicide rate tripled between 1950 and 1990.
The rise in depression and other psychological suffering cannot be written off as an artifact of changing definitions. As Psychology Today reported, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test of psychological well-being, has been administered to large samples of college students throughout the United States going as far back as 1938. A similar test called the MMPI-A has been given to samples of high school students since 1951. The results are unambiguous: Children, adolescents, and young adults have all experienced dramatic increases in anxiety and depression over the past several decades. The rates of these ailments were much lower during the Great Depression, World War II and the turbulent 1970s than they are today. I asked a New England college administrator with many decades of experience what the most notable change was that he saw among the students. I was wondering if perhaps their general knowledge might have declined over the years, or their political tolerance atrophied. What he said surprised me: "The most outstanding thing that has changed is the enormous growth in the number of students with mental health issues."
Nationwide, student health centers are inundated with mental health concerns. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ohio State in the past five years has seen a 43 percent increase in students seeking mental health counseling. At the University of Central Florida, the requests for mental health treatment have increased 12 percent annually for the past decade.
Young people who are not in college are even more prone to depression and anxiety, if less likely to seek help. A Child Trends report suggests that adults 18-29 living below the poverty line were twice as likely as others to report depressive symptoms.
Something is robbing young people of happiness and well-being. Figuring out what it is requires a certain modesty. Still, you will find many a facile explanation accompanying reports of these findings. Time magazine, for example, fingered social media. "It's hard for many adults to understand how much of teenagers' emotional life is lived within the small screens on their phones." An Ohio State therapist who spoke to The Wall Street Journal cited "the economy, the rising cost of tuition, the impact of social media and a so-called helicopter-parenting style that doesn't allow adolescents to experience failure."
There is no doubt that social media brings out the savage in human nature (Twitter is enough to depress me), and surely "helicopter" parents should permit their kids to grow up, but these explanations strike me as wide of the mark.
The most consequential social change of the past several decades is not the dawn of social media but changing family structure, and it turns out that adolescent depression and suicide are closely linked with divorce and single parenting. Teens who live with a single parent have twice the rate of suicide attempts as those who live with both parents. The same is true of other forms of distress and self-harm. To understand why kids are so anxious and depressed, we should look not just to their phones but to their homes.
Still, if a couple has divorced or never married in the first place, all is not lost. One reason family instability is so hard on kids is that the financial, social and work pressures the parents endure tend to make them less available for their kids. Single parents can try to compensate. Even if teenagers are living in a single-parent home, the quality of their relationships with their parents remains critically important to their risk of depression. Adolescents whose mothers were warm and supportive during disagreements, rather than angry or argumentative, showed lower rates of sadness, anxiety and lack of self-control. A study from Israel found that children who were close to their parents suffered fewer psychological effects after being under rocket attack than children who did not receive such support. Adolescents who engaged in activities with their mothers were less likely to commit suicide than those who didn't. Someone coined the term "fragile families" to describe the social experiment we've been undergoing for the past several decades. The suspicion that it has led to fragile psyches is strong.
For socialism and communism to succeed, first the family, those first loyalties, must be severed. Looks like it’s working. The problem is that it’s bad for everyone. Even the bureaucrats suffer because the people whose resources they want access to can’t produce any resources.
The most consequential social change of the past several decades is not the dawn of social media but changing family structure, and it turns out that adolescent depression and suicide are closely linked with divorce and single parenting. Teens who live with a single parent have twice the rate of suicide attempts as those who live with both parents.
Somebody once wrote about things you aren’t allowed to talk about in America. I believe this is one such issue. We aren’t allowed to talk about how we have normalized out of wedlock birth and single motherhood.
Since the “mental health” community tends to be liberal, I expect that they will not discuss the family structure aspect of the problems they are reporting on here.
Since saying anything about single motherhood is regarded as an attack on single mothers, per liberal criteria, instead, a key factor in the problems of these youths will simply be ignored, as they report on other aspects of this problem instead.
I get really wary when I read articles like this. Yet another “crisis” that needs to be addressed by government spending or medicating kids, or sending them to therapy. 36% are depressed, then they go to college where 50% of them will be “raped.” Then they’ll join a job market where they won’t get paid “what they are worth.” And on and on.
Our entire culture is a factory for manufacturing mental illness and unhappiness.
(1) Today's economic behavior considers children a poor investment for parents.
(2) Public school is depressive. Now I'll read to see what the article says.
(3) parents divorced (from the article).
Dems, schools, parents, and media are saying daily (hourly)
* we’re doomed
* republicans are destroying the future for our kids (global warming is destructive, US debt is not)
* there’s no solution except destroying conservatives (then Rs win congress and WH)
* you have no responsibility
* you have no ability to determine your future
* you can’t stand up to, or fight bullies. They will destroy you unless some group of people you don’t know stops them (and the group fails)
* if you’re a girl: republicans want to destroy women’s health (nevermind “women’s health” mean abortion, that still scares girls who won’t get pregnant)
* if your black: republicans want legalize racism (nevermind “racism” is meaningless, it still scares many kids who will never experience it in any harmful form)
And they build an additional filter bubble around themselves and avoid being exposed to anything else. How could anyone in that position not be depressed and suffering anxiety? Most kids actually aren’t having the issues, but they aren’t interesting so studies focus on the ones who the media have scared out of their minds with biased reporting. But the focus is the kids’ reactions, not the cause because the cause is not politically correct.
This is hard work, and it has been for a long time. Jesus himself said "Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye."
Try telling one's cousin Bob on his 3rd wife that maybe his son Johnny is in rehab again because Bob is a narcissistic jackwagon ...THAT is hard but effective work, but we don't seem to do that much anymore. Maybe we should.
No. More social engineering does not seem to be the remedy recommended.
Even alluded to in the article, the remedy is in the parents who cannot or will not be responsible for building an intact, biological family every child wants and yearns for.
Cannot needs help. Will not needs to be condemned again.
I can’t imagine social media being looked back at in 100 years as being a good thing for society. Even if the divorce rate and single mom rate was 1940 levels or whatever.
Freegards
Our family is intact, but my kids suffer from it. My son is rrally a mess.
However, depression and bipolar run in my family. My mom was bipolar, and my grandmother had some issues too, but I’m not know those details.
Of course our kids are sad. They’re being raised by a bunch of strangers. Our children spend their entire day with people who consider them just “a job.”
Destroy the family structure, the basic bed rock of stability in any nation, plus denigrate, confuse, reject, and mock traditional, God ordained morality and you destroy the soul of the individual and that nation - no meaning, no hope, no reason to live or die for something - John Lennon’s utopian anthem, “Imagine” espoused that very thing.
And certainly they have no extending family to draw on.
Even though we were overseas four years out of five when we got back stateside my brother and I were quickly folded back into the extended family. We were part of the group and while they might, and did, pick on us no outsider had better try.
The natural family has a mom and dad and somewhere between five to ten siblings. There should also be some cousins, aunts and uncles in the mix. Because sometimes you need an adult to talk to that is not your parent.
New Zepplin song “Hey LGBT Maggots, leaves those kids alone!”
Good point. In the process of cultural cleansing the US, the Left has opened children to evil they should not be exposed to.
The happiest kids I ever witnessed was the homeschool community I met while homeschooling my youngest son. He even told me he was feeling happiness he had not felt since he was little. He was in the second grade.
I did not confuse him with social politics. Life was common sense. I set clear standards he was to meet and enforced them fairly. I tutored him when he needed it to understand his academic material. I answered his questions. I cared. I knew him and appreciated him as the boy he is. We were too busy for television and the computer was for research.
Yep, they’ve all been raised in daycare.
I said it just a few weeks ago. In daycare they can adequetely feed an infant but if his mother is holding him she is most likely looking at him with love and the provider is just doing a job.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
2) American exceptionalism no longer taught in schools AND ridiculed by pop culture=kids don't realize how blessed they are to be American.
3) Anti-American messages in movies, music, professional sports, and video games, like the just released (or soon to be released) Far Cry 5. Of course they feel like crap, because as the Leftists tell them, America sucks and the rest of the world is so great and happy (despite the female genital mutilation, Ebola, and all that other stuff they never talk about).
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
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