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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).'"
Stop being a bunch of wussies!
Seriously, kids today have to wear helmets just to ride a bike, have some pediatrician putting them on powerful Autism medication if they don't start talking at just the right time, are diagnosed with Asperger's the second they show the least bit of shyness, are taught by teachers who scream "AHDHD--Drug him up!" the first time they act out in class, and come home to parents who think that a child molester is hanging out on ever street corner just waiting to kidnap their kid. *They're* not the ones who are screwed up, it's the adults around them that are screwed up.
JUST LET THEM BE KIDS, for Christ sake! Stop acting like there is something wrong with them because they're not perfect, or act differently than you expect, or make stupid mistakes. That's what makes them kids. Stop cocooning them like they're delicate eggs who will crack at the slightest risk or challenge. And, above all, stop drugging them up. A kid shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a serious physical problem. You don't give a kid powerful psychotropic drugs just because they're rebellious or shy. They'll have plenty of time to dope themselves into a stupor and cry at a psychologist's office when they're adults.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
With myself (sample size of one) I find that I have a near constant level of neurosis (which does thankfully decline overall as I get older). When things are going badly in some area, I can direct my dwelling towards real anxieties that actually exist. Dealing with relationship, earning a buck, dealing with family etc. When everything is going well I find some new unrealistic area to direct those anxieties.
I suspect in the good old days, people were too busy trying to feed themselves to worry about needless shit. In this age of relative abundance and leisure time, we have much more time to devote to our neurotic navel gazing. And our self survey results reflect that.
Well, what do they expect when they remove all competition from a kid's life? I've seen parents that refuse to let their kids participate in anything competitive, for fear that if they should lose their child's dreams will be permanently shattered. All this leads to is the kid thinking they really can do anything, when the actual fact is that everyone has limitations in some form, and in a competitive world, sometimes you lose. I assume this is what generates the majority of this "unrealistic optimism". Coddling children and not allowing them to experience real situations will not prepare them for the real world.
today is spelling optional day.
Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external - from wealth to looks and status - has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.
And also:
The study is not without its skeptics, among them Richard Shadick, a psychologist who directs the counsellingcentre at Pace University in New York. He says, for instance, that the sample data weren't necessarily representative of all college students. (Many who answered the MMPI questionnaire were students in introductory psychology courses at four-year institutions.)
I have a cute anecdote about a friend who graduated with a psychology degree and left her job as an assistant to become a grade school teacher because most of the psychologists at the Manhattan practice had more psychological problems than their patients.
Emphasis mine. Now, another interesting thing about Jean Twenge is that the books she writes aren't universally accepted by her peers:
"Generation Me" inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like "It’s all about me," "Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic" and "Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids."
Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called "The Narcissism Epidemic."
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
"It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up," said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties" (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Granted you could claim that this is just one example of two camps infighting in a field that plagues even physics and hard sciences but I think it's important to realize that this study might be a little self serving. Personally I share two concerns. The first being similar to Shadick's in that I'm not sure how these two studies were normalized samples and the second questioning if we have any idea what the 'norm' is for these 'diseases.' How subjective is this test and would a variance of 1% to 6% for depression be unrealistic if we knew that it's been as high as 10% at other points in time between 1938 and 2007?
... but sometimes I encounter a youth who says, "My boyfriend just broke up with me and now I sit in my room and listen to depressing music." And they (or their over protective parents) think they need medication for that. They don't. Sounds to me like they need to be picking rock and bailing hay to help take their mind off that. We're overmedicated as it is. If Ms. Twenge continues to push this idea it might just get worse. How many people read news of this study and though "maybe my kid needs to see a psychologist for depression?" It's hard to look past this and assume the motives for this study are pure.
The curmudgeon in me wants to chalk this up to kids having it too good these days. No polio to worry about, no eight hour shifts to support the family and more information swarming them. A lot of today's youth have the luxury of being diagnosed with hypomania. Now I know that there are serious cases of depression and always have been
My work here is dung.
FTFA:
Experts say such high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. Meanwhile, they also note some well-meaning but overprotective parents have left their children with few real-world coping skills, whether that means doing their own budget or confronting professors on their own.
So by bringing up our kids like wusses, we're creating wusses. That's not to say we need to go back to beating them "spare the rod spoil the child" BS, but giving them healthy limits and letting them screw up and pay the consequences.
That's were modern parents fail: they're either too strict and pushy or they're overly permissive and rescue the kid whenever they screw-up - even if it means getting them out of jail.
The above, of course, is in general. There are some wonderful parents out there.
American youth today have it very easy.
When I grew up in Hungary in the 1950s, life was somewhat difficult. My family was lucky, as my father was a supervisor at a washing machine factory, and my mother was lucky to have a job as a seamstress. We at least had food, and did not go hungry like so many of our neighbors!
We had one neighbor, Piotr, who had several children. One of them died just after birth, and another drowned. His three remaining children grew to be adults. But when they were young, old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family! He would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust.
But let me tell you, what the children ate was not so good compared to today's food! The bread, it was almost always stale. So it was used in horrid stews of left over meat and dirty water. On rare occasion there was chocolate (maybe once or twice a year). There were no Coca Colas! There were no potato chips! There were no McDonalds or Burger Kings!
When you have not any food, then social pressures become quite irrelevant. Success becomes defined by the meager foodstuffs in your pantry, not by the newness of your cellular telephone or the shine of your gold ganger jewelery or the brand name shirt with a stupid logo on it.
People are suffering from information and media overload...no down time for the brain. The whole GIGO business.
Suffering? Suffering? I'm enjoying it!
But seriously, I think humanity is going to have to find a new way to live. All our new technologies change the rules that our bodies and minds are adapted for. Either that or these technologies can't be sustained. We are fast approaching either total environmental burn-out or a new era of abundance... perhaps both at the same time. We are drowning in information, pollution, and choice. Most of human history has been a battle against starvation followed by a battle against ignorance followed by a battle for individual liberty.
It was easier to eliminate information scarcity. Water, food, power supply will be harder to fix. Abundance of each of these unleashes new problems. Abundance does not equate with quality.
[signature]
Welcome to the year 2000 (er, 2010) and meet your new friend Information Anxiety. I'm 30 years old and I feel it. I constantly feel like I need to keep up with news, this and that, hobbies and interests that are fueled by easy access to information on the internet, social networking, friends, internet friends, real life friends that I only really see on the internet these days. Now compound all of that into a teenager's mind along with high school pressures, school work, trying to find themselves, hormones and being awkward, the opposite sex (or even harder yet, maybe the same sex), etc.
100 years ago, our main concerns were food, shelter, and family. These are second thoughts for many these days. I recently quit social networking for half a year and it was one of the best things I've ever done for myself.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Let's see; when you give kids a trophy for just showing up to the game, and high school kids make 'A' grades for minimal effort... kids today are conditioned to believe that life is easy, and they are 'super-duper'. This is the post accomplishment era we live in. Their actual test scores are among the lowest of civilized nations, yet their confidence levels are among the highest. What does this tell us? They don't know anything but they FEEL really good about it. This is what we get when the school system focuses on the importance of feeling rather than the importance of achieving. When kids discover that the real world doesn't care how you FEEL, it is rather anxiety inducing. The employer stance has necessarily become one of: I DON'T CARE how you feel, can you do the job or not?" Pay is based upon accomplishment and achievement, not on feelings.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I dunno...I think there is a huge difference even in the past 20 years. I was born in 1974 and was told that basically not everyone is a winner - there are some losers, the world needs astronauts and ditch diggers, we cant all drive a hot rod camaro - sometimes you have to have the brown LTD that smokes a little when it starts up. It conditioned to me the inevitable failures that I would have in life and I did not overreact. Life sucks, get a helmet.
Kids these days (hell, my 17 year old cousin is like this) are told that EVERYONE is a winner and a unique and beautiful snowflake, that everyone can be whatever they want to be, and that we all can have whatever we want. These kids have no exposure to failure...and have a meltdown when they meet it for the first time.
My wife and I have had this discussion (and its gone interesting since she is Swedish and was not raised around corporal punishment - while I got whippings if I deserved it) and we are going to raise our kids to not bullshit them about the reality of life. That there is always going to be someone better at them at something - but that its ok. Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best, get picked last at kick ball because you dont run as fast as some of the other kids, or the girl/boy of you have been having wet dreams about is not interested in you.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
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.
When poorer kids in the 1930's started having problems in school, they were labeled as "stupid" or "lazy", given D's and F's, and that was it. Now, a school counselor is brought in and a much more specific and medically accurate label for their problem and recommend a treatment for them.
For wealthier kids, it seems to be partially a way of ensuring that their kid does well in school and other activities. A lot of these parents are going to start thinking something is medically wrong if the kid's grades start slipping into the B-/C range, and will find a counselor who will tell them just that and create a treatment. A diagnosed mental illness can turn a C student into a B+/A student due to extra time on exams, special help on projects, and so forth, as well as drugs that improve concentration (among other things).
The upside of this pattern is that more kids who do have real mental illnesses are getting treated properly and are able to handle their schoolwork better, rather than being simply dismissed as bad students. The downside is that you now have a large population of kids (and adults for that matter) who are wandering around drugged and a much narrower understanding of what behavior is "normal" enough to be *not* indicative of a mental illness.
I am officially gone from
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!
The title should have read:
US Adults Have Serious Mental Health Issues and Poor Parenting Skills
dealt with things like world war i, world war ii, the bubonic plague, the american revolution... etc.
all with less media resources, lower quality nutrition (we don't have lower quality nutrition these days, we have TOO MUCH nutrition), a worse set of ideologies, lower socioeconomic status, etc.
whatever stresses today's youth are going through, its fucking easy in comparison stresses previous generations have faced
get over it, grow the fuck up. sorry you're daily video game hours or facebook/ twitter diddling hours has been reduced. i think you'll find the ability to deal somewhere deep in your rich bounty of character. pffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I couldn't agree more. Whenever I have moved to a new apartment/house there is always a 1-3 week period where I have no cable or internet. After I would get home from work my wife and I would pretty much make dinner read a book and go to bed. It was absolutely amazing how our stress levels went down and how much more recharged we were waking up after calm evenings like that.
Now of course like most people, once my cable and internet showed up, my tv was always on, I was checking my email and working in the evenings. Long story short, I think the mind really does need some time to relax.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
I don't think so, to me the "unrealistic optimism" speaks more to the sense of "entitlement" that people seem to have these days. Which is in contrast to what the "American Dream" was to me "Yes anything is possible but there will be a lot of work"
I'd agree, although the excessive narcissism is probably the more significant root cause.
Since the 1960s (Surprised? No.) the emphasis on social promotion, 'feeling good about yourself', rewards for non-achievement, and a slippery sort of moral relativism all have combined to leave our children emotionally retarded, and frankly incapable of dealing with reality.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and evolution is fucking painful. Deadly, in fact. Remove the pain from growing up, and you end up with emotionally undeveloped people, with no ability to cope with hardship, no capacity to comprehend the shitty things life is going to inevitably hand them, and (seemingly) very little resilience to survive.
Go back and read Generation X. His book describes the glimmerings of the future. I'm 42 - a real GenX'er (turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990), and I see the beginnings of it in myself and my demographic. Lack of ambition, ennui, a juvenile inability to focus, as well as a difficulty being happy with much of anything. I'd attribute it in myself to a lack of hardship and challenge, and believe me it's a bastard to cope with on a day to day basis.
And yes, I'm aware that I'm essentially yelling "Get off my lawn!" but when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. They have a facility with electronics that amazes me, and I thought myself a fairly gadget-oriented guy. I regard them as "ignorant" because they don't know basic facts of geography, history, or culture - but then if one is permanently connected (as this twittering generation pretty much assumes) does one really need to store facts in their wetware? I think its necessary to have a basis of knowledge to understand the things going on around us, and to be usefully participatory adults, but then I'm old, I guess.
Oh, by the way, ROCK THE VOTE!! Ha ha ha /cry. And we thought we're screwed already....
-Styopa
Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best
You know who whines about their best.
In all seriousness though, it's very easy to make the statement "This is how we will raise our kids" and point fingers at parents who have even the slightest difficulty raising their children. I think that is unfair. If there was some magic formula that you could follow and end up with perfect children and no problems, we would have figured it out millenia ago. Reality is never so simple that you can say with any confidence that you will raise your children the 'correct' way, as there are so many things that can cause things to go off the rails.
Even if I had 100% of my time to devote to my children, there is no guarantee that they will turn out the way we expect them to, and while bad parenting may be the root cause for a lot of issues that we see in children, it isn't some blame catch-all for every problem we see.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
An interesting article from The Atlantic discusses a new view of children with genetic dispositions to "flawed" personality traits, such as ADHD. Much of it is based on a long-term study of a captive colony of rhesus monkeys.
In the barest of nutshells: while many children are like dandelions, and could survive and even prosper in any environment (poor, lousy parents, bad schools, etc.), others are like orchids. Raised in the wrong environment they become screw-ups. Raised in the right environment they thrive, and the traits that are considered flaws become strengths, even allowing them success beyond their dandelion brethren.
A good read even if you think they're wrong. One nice takeaway from the rhesus monkey study: in the long run, bullies never win.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
If you want more hardship in your life, go find it. Go join the army or something.
I consider my 'laziness' to be an adult realization that the 'go go go work till you drop' culture in this country is poisonous.
Blar.
A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
Pay is based on accomplishment and achievements...
No, it is not.
My investment banker counterpart earns about twice what an engineer does, and does even less work. True, the world does not care about your feelings, but the salary you receive is largely dependent on:
The first is usually a matter of education, the second, largely a matter of confidence.
One thing that negotiating a higher salary has taught me is that companies will always attempt to hire at the lowest possible salary. Being able to do a job 10 times better than the other guy doesn't mean a thing (wrt salary) if you don't exhibit confidence during the interview. Confidence goes a long way toward convincing an employer that you are worth more than the average guy.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
atheistic fanaticism
What is that? A "deafening silence" when teaching your kids about "creation science" or is it some other combination of oxymorons?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One of the things I find most annoying about Slashdot is the knee-jerk reflex some people have to respond to any unflattering comparison of the present day to some time in the past with, "Get off my lawn!" Yet strangely, when such mockery is genuinely appropriate in response to most of the comments here, it's nowhere to be seen.
I don't know what parallel universe most of the commenters are coming from -- whether most of them are childless or just get their version of reality from FOX News, I don't know -- but the environment in which my teenager finds herself is highly competitive, not remotely cocooning or coddling, and in many ways significantly more stressful than the one I grew up in. And I don't have her on any medication.
The thing that strikes me about today's kids is how obsessively schedule-driven they are. My daughter never seems to actually stop thinking about school or what she has to do next, and most of her friends are the same way. I suspect that this is at least partly responsible for the level of anxiety and depression in kids today. Far from lacking competition and discipline, the environment in which they move seems to have a surfeit of it, at least compared to my teenage experience in the 1980's, which was notoriously manic in its time but seems comparatively relaxed today.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
I am serious. I left the United States in my early 20's for good, and all my mental health problems started going away. I am happy, healthy, less stressed, sleeping good, eating proper food, more successful, and most importantly less paranoid about every little frigen thing around me. It has take years however to repair the damage caused by living in the U.S., but I continue to see it in Americans that leave the United States for good all the time vs. those that are just on vacation. They go through a decompression process that progressively that typically takes at least a couple of years for them to "normalize" when they are adults. When kids move out before the teenage years are over, they are well adjusted, happy, more engaged in the World around them.
American culture is really really one of the sickest cultures I have seen anywhere in the World, and most of the damage is done in the teenage years. Any parent that sends their kids to a U.S. school, should be arrested for child abuse.
Living in Chile
"Do you have P.A.D.? Nearly eleventy billion Americans have this potentially deadly disorder. Why have you never heard of this before? We at the *cough*bristolmeyerssquibb*cough* P.A.D. Coalition are trying to get the word out about P.A.D. now that we found that Plavix can be used to treat it! Call your doctor *now*... you may already be dying of something no one has ever heard of before last year!"
That pretty much summarizes the TV commercial I saw last week. Wag the dog, indeed.