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US Youth Have Serious Mental Health Issues
Ant writes "Google News carries a Canadian Press report that 'a new study has found that five times as many high school and college students in the United States are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era. ... Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by [San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge], researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review. Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate — with six times as many scoring high in two areas: 'hypomania,' a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5 per cent of students in 1938 to 31 per cent in 2007), and depression (from 1 per cent to 6 per cent).'"
I'd say a majority of adults I've met don't exactly lead healthy balanced lives either. Most of the stress and anxiety that I see in people I meet is due to their inability to deal with issues and conflicts in their every day lives in a logically and emotionally balanced way (intentionality).
A lot of people spend their entire lives without ever understanding the idea of being intentional, instead of a victim to what appears to be a random array of emotions.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
This
But I'll take it one step further, and then these kids hit college and are out on their own and they don't have anyone to fall back on for support. That's when the problems start to set in.
Does anybody have the numbers for EU and Asia? For some reason I'm not seeing the same stories here in the EU. Personally I think that in the US there is a real drive to get everybody who shows a bit of a problem directly on heavy medication instead of dealing with it while they grow up.
How about 1959 when I started grade school. We were two itchy trigger fingers away from nuclear anhaillation. Terrorists? Pshaw, those of us who had "duck and cover" drills don't worry about terrorists. Nuclear war with thousands upon thousands of warheads going off is REAL terror.
Free Martian Whores!
This would have been in the '70s, so I have no clue how common bike helmets were then, but the point still remains.
No one wore bike helmets in the 70's. In my experience, bike helmets really came into favor in the 90's.
For the record - is ADHD a brand new ailment in the history of mankind? Or, do you think maybe some really famous people had it, and were never diagnosed? I propose that ADHD was common throughout man's history, and that it has served man well. ADHD is not the problem, the problem are the parents and teaches who can't cope with an active child.
For starters, you might examine the lives of some military heroes. Start with Stephen Decatur. There was an ADHD if ever one existed!
Why conform, when the conformists are so fucked up?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
He said he ate glass, ergo it was a joke.
"during tough times he would eat grass , paper and sawdust."
grass will provide some vitamins and fill you up, but you can't digest it very well at all, so I bet it was cooked or stewed. Paper and sawdust (and mud) are often eaten as filling, and the mud can provide needed nutrients like iron. Your ID isn't very new; you should know these things.
You can't compare "polls" or "studies" from the 1930's to 2010 because definitions and attitudes have changed so dramatically during that timeframe. For Christ's sake... LABATOMIES were still a standard and mainstream mental health practice at that time! Today pretty much anyone who's down in the dumps would say they feel "depressed", and anyone who is high-strung would say they experience "anxiety". Eighty years ago, however, they would simply say they feel "sad", or "nervous". It would be far less likely for them to REPORT such common feelings, and far less likely for the medical butchers of the time to label it as mental illness unless it were truly asylum-worthy.
It's preposterous to say that depression and anxiety are more prevalent today than during the Great Depression, and the worst war the planet has ever known. The only thing more prevalent today is our willingness to label those states of mind as such.
Yet for some odd reason we rode our bikes and are still alive.
Not all of you; only those who lived to brag about it. GGP told his anecdote of someone who did not.
I would expect that vast majority didn't have any problems, naturally (I rode my bike without a helmet since I was... 5 I think?.. for as long as I was still living in my country, where it's legal; everyone else did, too, and I don't recall anyone hurt in a way that a helmet would prevent).
But there's always a chance, and it might just be you who draws the unlucky ticket next... and if a helmet helps with that, then why not?