The Kids Are Not Alright

The kids are decidedly not alright. Surveys of the mental health of college students has exposed some appalling problems. Over the past eight years student mental health has declined, to the point where most of today's college students are mostly either depressed, anxious, suicidal or suffering from eating disorders. 

Over 60% of American college students today are suffering from mental illness. 

The New York Post reports (via Maggie’s Farm):

Researchers at Boston University recently revealed some staggering findings — that depression among college students increased by nearly 135% over eight years, while anxiety surged 110%.

Lipson’s team also looked at rates of eating disorders, non-suicidal self-injury and suicidal ideation, which increased at rates of nearly 96%, almost 46% and 64% respectively. As for “flourishing,” rates decreased overall.

Obviously, the Covid lockdowns had a largely deleterious impact on college student mental health:

To no surprise, depression increased most on average during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, over 60% of students met the criteria for at least one mental illness — double the rate of 2013.

The authors bemoan the fact that fewer and fewer students are signing up for counseling, though, I have been hearing that up to 40% of some student bodies do consult with counselors and psychiatrists:

Furthermore, they noted a decrease in the rate of college students seeking help and mental health services, especially among racial and ethnic minorities.

So, the researchers suggest that we need more mental health professionals, though they remark that good ones are a rarity. I am impressed by this qualification, because one of the realities here is that most of the counseling, especially the kind that tells young people to get in touch with their feelings, to feel their feelings and to indulge their sometime capacity for empathy is worse than useless. It is the problem more than it is the solution. In truth, since so many people think that it's the solution, the chances are good that it's the problem.

Similar mental health data has been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calling it a “cry for help” from young Americans.

The shocking numbers come at a time when good therapists are increasingly few and far between, according to the federal Health and Resource Service Administration. The agency has estimated that the US will be short 8,000 clinical, counseling and school psychologists by the year 2025.

One suspects, without having done any surveys, that the problem is much larger than the availability of counseling. One also suspects that the problem lies in the culture at large, in a culture that tells white students that they must hate themselves for their white privilege and that tells non-white non-male students that they are oppressed.

If that is the cultural expectation and the prevailing dogma, one can easily understand why these students are becoming mentally ill in large numbers. They are doing it to survive their college years and their college classes.

One does not know for a fact, but one suspects that the Asian-American students who have gravitated toward the STEM field are not suffering the same mental distress.

As for the culture, consider this aberration. We recall that a former American president touted the therapeutic benefit of hope-- he called it, agrammatically, the audacity of hope.

One might imagine that hope is the cure for depression, because after all, the word despair means hopelessness. As it happens, this is untrue. Hopelessness might characterize depression, but the cure for depression is pride-- pride in achievement, pride in accomplishment, pride in country.

Right now, these are largely tabooed. Ergo, the more vulnerable among us are suffering from a surfeit of useless hope. And they have learned not to take pride in their achievements. They have been taught; it has been drummed into them, that their achievements were unearned, the product of their privilege. If they fail, they are told that it's not their fault; they are victims of the white power elite and can only succeed by burning down their neighborhood. It’s a good way to produce mental illness.

As you might know, it wasn’t always thus. Some of us remember a time when Americans were proud to be Americans. For those of us who do not, I offer a description offered nearly two centuries ago, by a French observer of America. It should be listed under the category-- how far we have fallen.

Alexis de Tocqueville said this:

In the United States the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view; they are an object of solicitude to the people of the whole Union, and every citizen is as warmly attached to them as if they were his own. He takes pride in the glory of his nation; he boasts of its success, to which he conceives himself to have contributed, and he rejoices in the general prosperity by which he profits. The feeling he entertains towards the State is analogous to that which unites him to his family, and it is by a kind of egotism that he interests himself in the welfare of his country.

Of course, that was before therapy took over our culture and before we learned that we could not graduate college without expressing full throated hatred of our country. If you wrote today what Tocqueville wrote in the early nineteenth century, you would flunk out of college. Better yet, you would be attacked by your teachers and classmates-- and would be sent off for thought reform.

If may be mere happenstance, but this morning the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by a schoolteacher named Daniel Buck. In it, he explained what has been happening in America’s graduate schools of education, the ones that prepare teachers for pre-college education. This shows what children are being taught in public schools, and it tells us that these students have had their psyches mangled well before they arrive in college.

For the record, among the products of that system, we count one Dr. Jill Biden, she of the affected title. As it happens, Dr. Jill is still teaching in a community college. Obviously, we are not talking about the summit of academic achievement.

Anyway, Buck describes the education he received in Wisconsin as he was preparing to become an eighth grade teacher:

I studied for a master’s degree in education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. My program was batty. We made Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets. We passed around a popsicle stick to designate whose turn it was to talk while professors compelled us to discuss our life’s traumas. We read poems through the “lenses” of Marxism and critical race theory in preparation for our students doing the same. Our final projects were acrostic poems or ironic rap videos.

I emphasize the fact that this had nothing to do with education. It was therapy, and nothing but therapy. Students learned nothing except how to write themselves into an oppression narrative, and to therapy their psyches.

In place of academic essays, graduate students write personal poems or collect photographs. These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.

So, we have produced an academic system where braindead teachers, many of whom would have loved to teach, are subjected to thought reform in their graduate education courses. Since that is all they know, that infects what they teach children.

The result, children who end up knowing nothing, being unprepared to work in the real economy, suffering from one or another form of mental illness, but fully capable of voting for the right candidates.