We Don't Buy It: Behind the "Mental Health Crisis" of Young People?

Everybody has a take on why young people are suffering this "mental health crisis." Is it the loneliness? The social media? The opioids? The smartphones? The nicotine? The lack of sleep? COVID? Bad diets? Climate change?

Here’s my take. It is all of these things and more. We are not broken. Our systems and institutions are breaking. Our bodies, minds, and spirits are responding reasonably, and well, to a hostile environment.

We don’t buy it.

We don’t buy the myth of progress, and the myth that if you just roll up your sleeves and tug hard enough on your bootstraps, you will be okay. Because in our lifetimes, that has never seemed true.

While society tries to sell us stories of freedom, our friends are dying by gunfire in schools and at concerts. Our neighbors are dying in grocery stores, in nail salons, or by the hands of the state, which we are told is there to protect us.

When we vote for the person we most believe in, we are told WE have failed democracy. And we wonder why no one mentions that maybe American democracy has failed us?

And tragically, when we can’t buy the stories society is trying to sell us because they are so obviously false, meaning and purpose become harder to find. Some of us are just trying to survive with our cocktail of prescriptions, tricking our bodies into sensing this environment as safe or normal. For some of us, the environment is simply too harsh and we take our own lives. Still, others of us are grasping at straws, running toward experiments that might offer us some agency by doing things differently — to reclaim meaning and purpose and make survival a little easier. But when we buy houses with our friends, or question the institution of marriage, or prioritize living our lives today over working a job we hate, we are often told we are irresponsible. When we protest peacefully, insisting that Black lives matter, or protest peacefully insisting that Palestinians deserve to live in their homelands, or protest peacefully in solidarity with the more-than-human world, we are treated as criminals, at best -- we are arrested and tased and gassed for assembling and speaking in support of the world we need.

As many of us see things getting worse around us, we choose to live for today — and many of us are willing to risk tomorrow to make sure that others have the luxury of the same choice. We do this because our futures are so destabilized and uncertain.

We have inherited this sick, thrashing culture. We are trying to make home on a planet who is using the wounds humans have inflicted on her to teach humans a lesson.

We are here. And like any generation before, we cannot chart a new path forward without the support and wisdom of our elders. But we cannot do it with our elders unless you help us face and change the realities in which our young minds and bodies and spirits can no longer survive.

We need you to start asking with us: what does thriving—REAL thriving—look like? What can it look like if we are brave enough to imagine new worlds, and then to build them, together, in the shell of this broken one?