During 2015, 3 million young people between the ages of 12 and 17 had a major depressive episode and roughly 6.3 million had had an anxiety disorder. These numbers are increasing by the day and they do not show signs of stopping.
Our young people are a lot of different things. They are smart. They are innovative. They are learning how to cope in a world that seems to reinvent itself every 24 hours. Children born in the post 9/11 era have never known a world without global conflict. Terrorism abroad and at home is normal to them. It is normal to us. Shootings make the news almost daily. Young people today have found a way to live our lives while looking fear in the face.
Many people in older generations would like to point to our struggles with mental illness as proof we are weaker and less able to face reality than generations past. Perhaps, but personally I think they are misunderstanding us altogether. It’s not that we can’t handle “mean words,” financial problems, and global conflict the same as they did when they were young. We simply can’t handle them all day, every day.
The phones we have in our pockets are not only used to bring us good news and information 24/7. They also bring us the bad news. Before the internet and phones, it could have taken days for people in Arkansas to know about a loss of life in another part of the world. Now, we know almost instantly and it is blasted all over the media until something else equally bad comes along for the news cycle to digest.
They are correct in saying bad things have always happened, but I would venture to say when they did, people heard about them once days later and then they had the luxury of moving on. People used to be blessed with the ability to be able to choose if they would dwell on the evil in the world.
Young people born into the age of social media don’t have that ability. We are told every time something bad happens anywhere on the globe and we are reminded almost 24 hours a day. If a child dies in India, we know. If there is a human rights violation in Africa, we know. If there is a school shooting in the United States, we know. Not only do we know, but we care and oftentimes very deeply.
Adolescents today worry about so much more than what is going on at school and at home. We worry about college and finding a job. We worry about our families. We worry about globalism. We worry about human rights. We worry about social media. We worry if we are presenting ourselves appropriately on those platforms.
We look fear in the face every day, at all hours of the day because many of us lack the knowledge or the skills to turn off this constant flow of information and just be in the moment. It is no wonder that young adults are struggling as much as we are with mental health. It is not because Millennials are weak. It is because we have the perfect storm of circumstances that led to young adults becoming overburdened and a mental health care system that was ill prepared to care for them. I think it's past time for us to put the phones down and start taking care of ourselves.
