There's that, there's also a better understanding of mental illness, so less if it goes unrecognized, undiagnosed, and unrated. Growing up, I was an intelligen

There's that, there's also a better understanding of mental illness, so less if it goes unrecognized, undiagnosed, and unrated. Growing up, I was an intelligent kid (if a bit shy) who just needed to be more organized. Today, I'm an AuDHD[1] adult who just needs to have others to have different expectations in some cases, and just benefits from having access to Adderall for some of the others. In college, I was just a sad kid who thought fantasizing about near-death scenarios were something everyone does. Today, I am certainly not doing that, in no small part thanks to Sertraline, 100mg, and therapy. The author presents a good case that this time, there's something different than before. An increase in understanding and rates of reporting does not account for increase in suicide rates, for example. But the bucket mental illness epidemic in the title (and things like the "TikTok autism/ADHD" epidemic) are partially attributed to that. Then, there's the COVID pandemic lockdowns which pushed many people to their limits, and resulted in a higher rate of both diagnosis/treatment and consequences of mental illness (or unwellness, if I may). Then, there's the simple fact that kids in the US are growing up in a world with huge economic uncertainty, little chance of making enough money to become homeowners, the potential of nuclear war being discussed in the media, the potential for civil war being nonzero, ballooning healthcare and education costs, climate chnage not being addressed, and... And after accounting for all that, we may come to the conclusion that it's not that there's anything wrong with the kids or the modern way of life (with the Internet, cell phones, and all that), but that our entire society is fucked in very traditional ways. The proper comparison should be to the US circa Great Depression, and even then, the possibility of planetwide environmental collapse or nuclear war was not on the minds of anyone. Now both are a factor (between Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk, we have pretty much the entire world covered), which is giving an extra push to people who aren't well to begin with. As a Ukrainian-American Jew, I can absolutely say that the war in Ukraine and Israel has affected every aspect of my life in a major way (helping MIL evacuate from Kyiv being the most direct one, survivor's guilt being one of the hardest ones to deal with). But I guess that I'm not the only one by far. And I believe we should not be talking about the "Teen Mental Health Epidemic", but rather about how our fucked up world is fucking up the kids. It's on us to fix the world, rather than the kids (as the word "epidemic" may suggest). [1] https://romankogan.net/adhd https://romankogan.net/adhd