RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first to consider is that these statistics are based on students who self-reported mental or emotional problems and sought help for them. Though there may be objective standards for evaluating clinical depression, the criteria for moderate depression may be more subjective. What one person might characterize as being depressed might strike another as being out of sorts. Although the symptoms may be the same, the latter mindset doesn’t disenfranchise its owner from feeling competent to deal with his/her problem while the former might result in medication that has many side effects, not all beneficial. American culture tends to medicalize many transitional phases from childhood to old age, seeing illness or abnormality which other cultures might accept as normal rites of passage. The suicide of a student is cause for grief counseling for his class or the entire school, the implication being that young adults are not capable of processing their emotional responses without professional assistance. This is not surprising in a culture that starts with the premise that children need to be constantly shielded from physical and emotional trauma. The helmeted, knee-padded young roller skaters and bikers are also subjected to  early intervention therapies that are often questionable. Are children being treated for developmental issues they would eventually outgrow? Are little boys being drugged for conditions that may be appropriate for their age and gender? Is there a general overuse of pharmaceutical solutions that renders people more dependent on them and less resilient to life’s ordinary stresses and anxieties?

In a recent study following 2,000 people from the ages of 18 to 100 who were asked to list all the disturbing life events they had experienced (death of a parent or friend, divorce, illness, natural disaster etc), subjects were evaluated for their sense of well being. The ones who scored highest were people who had lived through between two and six highly stressful events. Those who claimed to have experienced none scored the same as people who had experienced up to 12 traumatic events. The study concluded that resilience is developed when people learn to exercise their mental toughness. It doesn’t develop without exercise and it collapses with too much.

Pedagogical fads in the last two decades have stressed protecting young people from failure. From the elimination of red- inked comments on their tests and papers to the lowering of the passing grade and the inflation of all other grades, we have been hell-bent on preventing students from suffering any consequences of their poor performance. Children get promoted undeservedly; many schools stress group activity over individual effort as a further example of non-competition. We have quite simply not allowed students to experience setbacks that might have developed the resilience they need in order to deal with life problems as well as academic courses.

Recent thinking about food allergies supports this proposition. It’s now felt that children should be introduced to small amounts of a much wider variety of foods at younger ages so that they develop greater tolerance for what they eat. Similarly, it’s been suggested that exposure to dirt and germs in small doses may help children develop better immunity against infection as they grow.  Our over-protective and misguided child rearing has made our young adults less capable of coping with the attendant stresses of independence and communal living. The sexual freedom at most college campuses may be a further cause for anxiety and depression in women as those with the greatest number of sexual partners show the most common signs of depression. Alternatively, the default status of co-ed dorms at many colleges must increase anxiety for students who aren’t emotionally ready for sexual activity but can’t resist peer pressure.

The over-protection of their bodies and psyches may be making young adults less capable of fending for themselves once all restraints have been removed. In college, students encounter a laissez-faire marketplace requiring them to make choices of what to do and what not to do. Even their grades are kept confidential from their parents by most school administrations who pretend that students who are totally supported by their parents are nevertheless emancipated in this regard. At many colleges students have been simultaneously infantilized by grade inflation that deludes them about their actual achievement and adultified (to coin a term) by a libertine atmosphere of sexual promiscuity and easy drug availability.

Ironically, the students who are in desperate need of psychiatric help on campus are usually the ones who don’t seek it. Only a small fraction of Americans suffer from schizophrenia -1.1% of people 18 or older in a given year. By contrast, depressive disorders affect 6.7 percent of the same age group. Perhaps we could work on lowering that number by giving young people the opportunities to cope with poor educational performance and failure in ways that toughen them and spur them to improvement. That way, by the time they get to college, they will actually belong there and will be better equipped to rely on their inner resources instead of pills, alcohol, drugs or sex. They will have earned the sine qua non of Oprah Winfrey and American education: legitimate self-esteem and a better sense of well being.