The Youth of the 21st Century is in Crisis — And We’re Failing Them

Young People Aren’t Just Hurting — They’re Being Taught to Hurt Each Other, and It’s a Crisis that We Need to Talk About

Image Credit: CNN

You don’t have to look too hard to see it. Our kids are in crisis. And it’s a serious crisis. There’s going to be the kind of guy — you know the type — who dismisses this out of hand, saying something like, “I had it tough, too!” Maybe you did, but the evidence, which is generational speaks for itself. And when you look at it, the findings are dire. What do I mean? Try this on for size.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1 in 3 girls. Up 60 percent in a decade. Those are startling numbers. They should give us all pause. That a third of young women are considering killing themselves is a Big Deal, and no…

It hasn’t “always” been like this. When issues like this are discussed, there’s a reactionary tendency on the internet, an assumption of what social scientists call “mean reversion.” It’s always been like this, and we’re just talking about it openly now. In this case, that’s dead wrong. The statistics, which, like I said, are generational, are damning and shocking. Just 5% of people over the age of 50 say they’ve had a “major depressive episode” — but the number’s triple that amongst young people. And that’s likely a tremendous undercount, as these things tend to be. Here’s another number that’s probably truer: 45% of high school students say they’ve felt sad or hopeless in the last year, and 20% say they’ve had suicidal thoughts.

Still not convinced? OK, let’s keep going, so that there’s a good understanding that this a very real crisis. 

Self-harm and suicide both skyrocketed after 2010 in the U. S., and those results cannot be explained by self-report issues.

How much so? Rates of self harm more than tripled, which is what suicide rates did. Think about what it means in a society that young people’s suicide rates are exploding off the charts.

So, no it hasn’t always been like this. This is new, it’s different, and it’s grave.

And there are differences by gender, too. Girls seem to have it worse than boys, and that’s saying something, because, make no mistake, it’s not as if boys are sailing on smoothly by.

So what’s going on here? What’s this crisis about? Well, on one level, it’s pretty easy to understand. Young people are probably feeling overwhelmed. By…all of it. The state of collapse of their societies and the world around them. The return of the old poisons of fascism and hate and violence. Economies stagnating and shrinking. The sense we’re all haunted by — is there even going to be much of a future, when lunatics and billionaires and lunatic billionaires are hoarding the very resources we need to fix democracy, the planet, and life on it…or this it? Again, sure, you can be that guy. “Man up! Things have never been better!!” Only…

That’s not true. You see, things haven’t “never been better.” What else is going in the world these days? Well, progress, for the first time in centuries, has flatlined and gone into reverse. And that begins to explain a lot.

Why are girls affected most? Well, if you understand progress going into reverse, then everything snaps into focus a little bit more. They have the most to lose. Girls are the beneficiaries of decades of progress. It wasn’t so long ago that being a woman and having a professional career was a non-starter, and even today, of course, there are huge, huge gaps in everything from incomes to opportunities for women. Famously, the S&P 500 has more CEOs named Mike and James than… women. 

Girls have the most to lose. Well, among the most to lose, if you want to nitpick, though I’m not sure that’s really worth anyone’s time. As progress comes undone…well, you can already see what they’re up against. Let’s take the story of, say, someone like the mega-influencer guy who recently got busted for sex trafficking in Eastern Europe. Figures like that make fortunes from…teaching young men to objectify, hate, and despise women, to literally sexually exploit them, to aim very real violence at them. 

When I say “the reversal of progress,” it might sound abstract to you, or you might think of something numinous and vague, to happen in the future…but it’s happening to girls, right here and now. They probably feel as if they’re under attack. From every angle. They turn on social media, just want to share their lives, and the next thing you know, manfluencer-trained boys are calling them every sort of name under the sun, threatening to hurt them, and so on. And the feeling of being under attack isn’t just feeling. It’s real.