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Trigger Warnings and Mass Psychogenic Illness
- yasp 8y agoThe essay mentions Jonathan Haidt's "The Coddling of the American Mind", so I will chime in with a pertinent excerpt which has data that the essay doesn't mention. >A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, using data from 139 colleges, found that by the 2015–2016 school year, half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns. The report notes that the only mental health concerns that were increasing in recent years were anxiety and depression. Confirming these upward trends with a different dataset, Figure 7.3 shows the percentage of college students who describe themselves as having a mental disorder. That number increased from 2.7 to 6.1 for male college students between 2012 and 2016 (that’s an increase of 126%). For female college students, it rose even more: from 5.8 to 14.5 (an increase of 150%). Regardless of whether all these students would meet rigorous diagnostic criteria, it is clear that iGen college students think about themselves very differently than did Millennials. The change is greatest for women: One out of every seven women at U.S. universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials.