You may have heard in recent years about an increase in the numbers of young people seeking mental health services. Whether this is due to an increased awareness and acceptance of mental illness, or an increase in the number of young people suffering mental illness, is debatable. A recent study compiles data from as far back as the 1930s to indicate that the increase in mental illness among youth is real and measurable, based on decades of answers given in the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

San Diego State University professor, Jean Twenge, and a team of researchers compiled more than 77,000 MMPI results of high school and college students to come to the conclusion that youth in today's culture are by far more inclined to suffer from three forms of mental illness in particular: hypomania, depression, and psychopathic deviation. For clarification, hypomania is defined as, “a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism,” while psychopathic deviation, “is loosely related to psychopathic behavior in a much milder form and is defined as having trouble with authority and feeling as though the rules don't apply to you.” Ring any bells?

While there are always loopholes, caveats, and different ways of interpreting data like this, it does present an interesting question. Why do students today seem to have more problems with mental illness? While it does seem evident that it is now more acceptable to admit to and seek treatment for mental issues, the surveys used in this study were not given to students based on whether they were currently seeking treatment for mental concerns.

Scott Hunter, director of pediatric neuropsychology at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital opines that youth raised to believe that they are capable of anything are left set up for major disappointment and stress when they do not reach the heights they had been promised. After all, if you tell every child that they can become president, then 60,000 plus young people one day may be very disappointed. While many believe that encouraging our children to reach for the stars can only make them more productive overall, maybe it is this same well-intentioned lesson that sets them up for higher stress when they only get as far as the moon.

For example, there was a time where men were expected to be breadwinners, and women entering the career force knew they could expect to be nurses or teachers and little else. While these restrictions may have been limiting, maybe those living under them felt some stability in knowing, at least a little more clearly, what they could expect.

Some also note that many modern methods' coddling and the “everyone is a winner” approach to raising children has left a generation without the ability to mentally cope with everyday situations once they have left the nest. As someone who has several friends who teach high school and college, I have heard horror stories of students crying and panicking when they do not do well. The students in these tales seem unable to reevaluate their approach to a class or assignment, and instead of dusting themselves off and trying again, they break down, questioning their whole self worth when they don't receive the grades they expected. I have even heard of college students, legal adults, whose parents come in to fight their grades on their behalf.

The lack of pride in and ability to solve one's own problems exhibited in many of these youth is worrying. While our modern society has the tendency to encourage children unequivocally to be rich, successful, and famous, maybe more effort should be given to let them value more varied roles (even the unspectacular ones) and move on from disappointments in a healthier manner.

-Julie is a blogger for The New View. Check out her bio to see where her view comes from.

Read More

Is the US increasingly a nation of psychoses? Ars Technica

Young People Today More Stressed Out, High-Strung, KPBS

Study: Youth Now Have More Mental Health Issues, Associated Press