What’s Driving the Youth Mental Health Crisis? We Asked 1,400 Clinicians.
“There are so many kids and teens in need of quality therapy, and not enough providers,” says the Politico article. The article goes on to say, “Anxiety and depression is spiking among young people, and no one knows why?”
I know why
Anyone with a basic understanding of human nature, who’s been paying attention for the last sixty years and has a grain of empathy, can tell you why. Clinicians are not those people. It’s like asking fire-fighters to define the causes of increases in arson. It’s not clinical, it’s societal. Treat the cause, not the result. I understand that’s not much help to a kid contemplating suicide, particularly if it’s your kid, but clinicians patch people up and have little knowledge of the cause of the accident.
And, by the way, a teacher, friend, neighbor, cop, shopkeeper, or stranger on the street can no longer hug a child in trouble
I blame a guy I voted for in 1980, Ronald Reagan
I was a 45-year-old Republican at the time and probably should have known better, but the ‘old communicator’ came aboard in plummy times business-wise and I was in business.
America was producer to the world in those days, in everything from automobiles to toasters. The GI Bill sent our returning warriors off to college and they were now running a new American Empire based on goods and services. Union wages and technology allowed fathers to support a family on a single paycheck, kids went to college without crushing loans, and mothers came home from war production to run the family.
I know ‘mothers came home’ strikes a sour note for women in business, but it’s part of the story
A family with a mother at home when the kids got out of school, balanced social life with homework, sports, dating and dinner as a family. That sounds ‘old timey,’ because it is. What we had in those post-war decades worked, until it fell apart, and the single wage-earner family paid the price.
Reagan broke the unions, and his first act as president was to fire the striking Aircraft Controllers Union members, the first huge offensive move in corporate America's war on everyone else. Mirroring Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, he began to privatize every government agency that wasn’t protected. In his eight years as president, every tool possible was removed from the toolboxes that governed big business in America. The frosting on the cake was allowing commercial banks to become investment banks. That, and offshoring American industry, began the race to the bottom for the American middle class.
Which may seem a long way around to clinical depression among American youth
But it’s not.
A healthy society nurtures its most at-risk members and, as the single wage-earner family disappeared, no one was left to nurture. That’s not conjecture. I was a Great Depression born child, coming into the world in 1935, ground zero of the 1929 financial disaster. As my father expressed it, when I was old enough to understand, we were not poor, we were just broke. His story would both break your heart and give you hope, but it was his arm around me that made me a man.
Remove those circumstances, and it’s evident why our kids are reaching out for drugs and lost among 2,000 ‘friends’ on their cell-phones, with no one to share a Coke and an arm around them when needed. Dad works two jobs that don’t bring home a living wage, mom holds another and gets by on Valium. McDonalds is not a dinner, but it’s what there is.
Is this the entire story?
Not by a long shot, but it is a story and asking 1,400 clinicians will not give you a better answer.
We adults have broken a nation that was the place everyone in the world hoped to come. Vietnam didn’t do it, nor did Iraq and Afghanistan. We did it, and now we Republicans and Democrats cannot even come close enough together to mend the error of our ways. Neither Joe Biden or Donald Trump can save us.
There is no one but us, the collective us, who broke our ‘beacon of freedom’ and must now find a way back
I’m sorry, mom, but we need you back in the family, and maybe we can sort out an equitable life for parenting somewhere down the line. Bernie, the DNC owes you an apology, but you are showing us all how not to give up and if I had my way, you would have a place on Mount Rushmore.
The rest of you Senators and Representatives might give some thought to leaving a personal legacy that smells bad and enlightens no one. Supreme Court Justices, why do you suppose you need armed guards to keep you safe from a nation that no longer trusts you? History will not treat you well.
A Congress that once called itself into session for three months to run the country (and it was enough), now spends three days a week begging for money (offsite of course, we have some standards). Then they leave on Thursday night to travel back to their constituencies, at our expense, to return late Sunday or, more normally, sometime Monday.
Doesn’t leave much time for legislating. But then, it doesn’t take much time to block the other party and vote as you are told.
Our kids, the ones at risk, the ones we turned over to clinicians, would like us to fire the clinicians and put our arms around them
Are we up for that?
If there’s healing to be done, it can’t begin anywhere but there. Clinicians need not apply…