US Youth Have Serious Mental Health Issues

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @02:31AM from the get-off-my-lawn-and-take-your-adhd-meds dept.

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).'"

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And? by FredFredrickson · 2010-01-12 02:35 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
What about Europe and Asia? by simp · 2010-01-12 02:57 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... by JWW · 2010-01-12 03:21 · Score: 4, Informative

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.