"the Haidts and Lukianoffs and Maranos of the world are upping the ante. These aren’t mere culture-war issues, they insist — college students’ mental health, their very lives in some cases, are at stake. And they have every right to make this argument. But if they’re going to, they need to play by the rules they themselves have set out and proffer actual, substantive evidence that kids are getting sicker, that, over time, otherwise-similar groups of kids are showing increasing amounts of anxiety or depression or suicidality (or other symptoms) that can’t be explained by other factors. This, it turns out, is hard to do, because such evidence doesn’t really exist...
Schwartz also said that the simple story line being promulgated leaves out some vital context having to do with campus counseling centers. “It’s important to understand that probably before 2000 or the mid-1990s or so, colleges really were not thinking of themselves as health-care and mental-health-care providers very much,” he said. Rather, they were focused on what were at the time traditional counseling services, like career counseling. But in the last couple decades, counseling centers have found themselves increasingly — and unfamiliarly — taking on the roles of frontline mental-health service providers.
What caused this shift? For one thing, the American mental-health-care system, which is currently something of a disaster, took a major beating during that span. “Access to services really just diminished in many areas of the country through the 1990s and 2000s, and schools were faced with picking up the slack,” said Schwartz. He thinks this can account for part of the perception that kids are getting sicker. “One of the things that has been argued is that counseling services are seeing more severely disturbed students because of the weakening of mental-health-care access in local communities around the colleges,” he explained. In other words, kids aren’t getting sicker, overall, but more of the kids who are sick lack other treatment options and are seeking out services via their universities. “So it looks like there are more and more sicker students, but the metrics aren’t necessarily there to support [that being the case],” said Schwartz."
This is really important about mental health, and what we should actually care about if we actually care about mental health (and not just being resentful when people point out that our favorite books are racist). Skim if you, like me, aren't necessarily here for nit-picking through arguments that you didn't care about much. But read what it says about mental health systems, and what mental health professionals are seeing.
Also, ughhh, I adore Jonathan Haidt's book. Even though he wrote a kinda moral-panic-clickbait article, go read about his studies on morality and politics, it is fascinating. I wrote all over my copy and someday I'll go back and write a whole review.
Related: "Don't Blame it on Depression"
FB: This picks apart the actual evidence in the articles that have been floating around trying to connect trigger warnings to anxiety disorders
"when you actually unpack these claims — when you put them in context and look for real evidence that kids are getting more fragile — there’s a lot less here than meets the eye. The true story of college students and mental health has to do with a hollowing out of the United States’ mental-health services, with overtaxed counseling centers, with a fundamental shift in the role that colleges serve, with changes in the composition of the nation’s student body. This is all very, very complicated, and none of it can be fairly summarized as “Kids these days are getting so fragile!”
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