History of Mental Health

Time Article Summary

Systematic tracking of youth mental illness in the United States began in the mid-1990s, with Federal Surveillance tracking rates from 1994 onward.

Youth mental illness has seen an alarming surge over the last decade, with 1 in 3 youth aged 12 to 17 experiencing a behavioral or mental health issue, including clinical depression, anxiety, and self-harm. Most foundations and agencies attribute this surge to the proliferation of digital devices, academic pressures, and post-pandemic disruptions. Some researchers include the effects of Great Recession (2007-2009) and caregiver mental health (loss of parents due to drug overdoses and firearms) as the strongest predictor.

Stress lives on a continuum between “who we are” and “who we pretend/strive to be”. Living in between, and especially near the later endpoint can lead to identity stress and mental illness. Some believe that affluent youth are less subject to the factors leading to mental illness because they have greater access to structured activities, leaving less idle time to find trouble. While data clearly shows higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal risk among adolescent youth living in poverty, unstable housing, and limited care access, affluent youth are also experiencing a mental health crisis (substance use, internalizing problems, pressure, isolation, and peer influences). While all these factors can influence mental illness, data has not demonstrated that the removal of any of these factors has caused the surge to leveled off or decline.

It seems we attribute the youth mental health crisis to everything and everyone, except ourselves. The neuroscience that supports identifying and understanding trauma causes and triggers are certainly meaningful in treatment of youth experiencing mental health crises. Our professions of therapy, psychiatry, and many holistic modalities are of great service in treatment, but without the ability to reverse researched factors with large scale changes in our society, they have thus far been unable to level off and reverse the upward trends of our current mental health crisis.

While we may not wish to admit it, our society is designed to drive youth toward the “who we pretend/strive to be” endpoint. It begins at, and sometimes before, birth. We play music and read to them in the womb. We name them after ourselves and coach them to become all the things we dreamed of becoming in our own lives, but failed. We instill them with our religious, political, and social belief. Then, we place them into a structured system of education, working for 40 years, then retiring with too little energy/health to make much more than support repetition of the same cycle.

So, what happens when a child is born with a brilliance with which we are unfamiliar? What happens when mere guardrails would be more appropriate than our loving and smothering guidance? When the child is wired to be “who they are”, but parents and societal norms drive them toward a different state, the child either conforms or resists. Both place the child in a state of sometimes overwhelming friction, or stress, forming the foundation for mental illness.