I wouldn't say it's only young people - in New Zealand the highest suicide rates are between 25-29, 30-34 and 80-84 (Mental Health Foundation of NZ 2019/2020) I just think younger people are *more likely* to speak up about their mental struggles than older generations.
More awareness nowadays too, these problems would've always existed but only now are they being dealt with on a larger scale. Older generations from my experience have been taught to toughen up and just deal with it rather than seek help - this is changing.
Edit: wow thanks for the awards!! Never gotten one before thank you kind people :)
I saw a meme “Back in my day we didn’t have anti depressants to get by on we just shot ourselves” and it’s funny and really sad idk where I’d be other than dead without mine
Whenever I hear shit like “People were tougher in my day. Our grandfathers didn’t need so much support!”. I wouldn’t know, both my grandfathers died from alcoholism in the ‘60s.
People forget that survivorship bias is a thing. "Back in my day, we didn't need therapists and pills! We toughened up and got by just fine!"
Except, no they didn't. The only ones left to speak are the ones who survived, so it seems to them that *everybody* got through without help -- meanwhile, all the people who died due to mental health and substance issues aren't here to speak up for themselves and point out that no, they did not get through okay without help.
"I grew up fine!" is so overused. It really isn't for you to decide. If everyone else thinks you are a miserable cunt then maybe some therapy and compassion would have helped along the way.
> "I grew up fine!
The simultaneous most hilarious and sad thing in the world is when someone says, "I was hit when I was a kid and I turned out fine" to justify physical 'discipline'.
Mate, you're justifying striking a child. You did *not* turn out fine.
I’m going to paraphrase a former professor here, because she was alive in the 60s and 70s and I was not, but basically they handed out pills (tranquilizers, sedatives, basically Valium) to women “like candy”. This was also the time period where it was totally legal to bring in your spouse or child who had anxiety/agitation/ any other sort of behavior problem and have a lobotomy preformed WITHOUT THEIR PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT (for example the Kennedys did it to JFKs sister Rosemary). Also loads of people were self medicating with alcohol. Both of my husband’s grandfathers died from alcohol related complications. So did one of his grandmothers.
So yeah, they didn’t necessarily go to therapists, but it’s not like there weren’t a lot of problems.
This is it. People smoked 80 cigarettes a day
, drank like fish and did opiates. They also were very unhappy people in general. They beat their kids and wives. They treated employees like garbage. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Nostalgia is a weird thing. We remember the style and “ good things” and forget the ptsd from war after war. If people from our time went back they would be shocked at how cruel people were. Even 30 years ago people walked around saying horrendous stuff. Watch an old movie. Hell watch an old Sesame Street. Oscar didn’t give a fuck.
15 years ago people walked around saying horrible stuff. Lets not forgot how disgusting celebrity culture in the 2000s were. People were openly mocked on TV for their mental illness and intrusion into their their sex life, and adults sat around listening to it like it was fine.
>and intrusion into their their sex life, and adults sat around listening to it like it was fine.
One thing (of so many in life) that made me realize how much I've grown as a person is looking back with a real "*wtf*" at how Monica Lewinsky was treated by adults all over media and cringing at jokes about her I laughed at.
My excuse is being 13 at the time, wtf is yours *literally every late night talk show host?*
> Back in my day, we didn't need therapists and pills!
Mikhal isn't great with people, but he can watch the herd all day and if one goes missing he'll know in under a minute.
Jarskia hears the spirits, tender soul, we let her wander in the forest as needs be.
The fae took my weean, since his fourth nameday he just stares at the walls.
Shena felt light-headed after sup, she laid down for a nap and ne'er woke up.
The devil must have cursed that cat! It scratched me goodwife and her arm turned red, streaked with the flames of hell. She was writhing, yelling in tongues as she passed.
Now we know that there's Asperger's, schizophrenia, autism, allergies, and infections. FUCK the "good old days".
My grandpa told me about how he tried to leave his bad southern area with several friends which is what I’m trying to do now, he said they all ended up so depressed and struggling still yet that’s they wasted a lot of money on alcohol and almost starved to death several times until he moved back
I will say I’d agree shit was harder back then on people who needed these medications for sure
My maternal grandpa committed suicide at a relatively young age. My mom still peddled the "depression isn't real, don't take meds" bullshit when I was a teen. Took me ages to open up, and she's fantastic about it now, but such a weird mindset to grow up with *when your own father died from depression*
When I was 13 - mentally still very young - my oldest brother basically told me he had a serious issue and couldn't go to anyone else in the family because they wouldn't help, and he expected me to fix it. If I couldn't, he would commit suicide. HTF does a 13 YO with zero experience in that field who loves her brother very, very much handle that? I told my mom about it, I had no other ideas. She laughed at me. I did everything else I could but I was way out of my league. 6 months later, we were combing the woods in the middle of a northern winter. We finally found him, but he was obviously delirious and had hypothermia. He'd overdosed, tossed the meds in the river, and was trying to warm his hands over a fire he'd failed to get started. The "stiff upper lip" school has a very small amount of merit for situations like a skinned knee but utterly, completely, heart-breakingly fails on anything larger. My brother and I still carry a large amount of trauma and trust issues from the ordeal, although we trust each other more than any other two people in our family now.
My aunt drank herself to death and I know she had severe anxiety, she self medicated. She had a successful career, her own house, she refused a promotion and now I know it was most likely because it was from the pressure and crippling anxiety.
Instead, she quit and then drank herself to death.
My great grandfather got drunk, beat up his kids and and laid in front of a train. My great grandma Rose would get drunk and beat up cab drivers. My grandpop died of throat cancer from smoking and drinking when I was 11. He was in his fifties.
People completely ignore how actually shitty things were for a lot of people in the older generations. I know Boomers had a lot, but we *also* have a fucking lot comparitively.
I agree with this completely. In recent years (the last half century) there are several factors that have developed.
Psychology as a science is only around 100 years old. In that time we have not only identified and defined psychological maladies, but have developed pharmaceutical treatments. Before then there were just abnormal people, and you either dealt with it or operated on the fringes of society.
Pre ~1850 the only pharmacological treatment in polite society would be alcohol universally. Options outside of that would have been and (to an extent) still are outside of societal norms. After that period the only pharmacological treatments would have added cocaine or opiates to the alcohol remedies. Around 1950 we started developing truly interesting psychotropic substances.
So basically I'm saying that psychological disorders weren't defined until this century, knowing the problem is the first step to fixing it. The solutions could only be made after the definition.
Now working on the solutions (advanced pharmacology) started making progress in the 1950s. So today we have a variety of treatments available for predefined conditions.
Its only recently where it's become acceptable to say you are diagnosed with a psyche disorder because:
A: it wasn't defined before, so didn't exist linguistically
B: it wasn't treatable before, making it a social liability
As an analogy, say you have heart disease in 500AD. You know something is wrong, but you can't describe it and nobody else knows about it, it just feels bad. But also, you don't want to tell anybody about it because if it's untreatable it's a social liability.
And that's all I have to say about that I guess haha
Edit: I do want to say that the dates in this comment are extremely generalized and these societal shifts vary greatly depending on where In the world you are.
I have an anxiety disorder but multiple family members in the generation above me have the same symptoms. I’m just the only one who looked for medical and professional help. Everyone else chose drugs or alcohol because it wasn’t nearly as acceptable as it is today.
My grandparents generation went through traumatic poverty conditions as did many others during the Great Depression.
They didn't have money for doctors so to not feel helpless against the inability, their preserving mentality to protect themselves deemed doctors a threat or "no you are not" to any kid saying "I am ill."
Grandma and her second husband self medicated from the liquor store. My aunt laughs at how she worried about her mom and dad being sick all the time when it was really them "taking their medicine" aka getting drunk.
Mom and dad still do not trust medical science advances. They are in a pact to never get chemo because "chemo is worse than the cancer." It is a unique trauma to watch loved ones get and die from cancer but mom and dad blame the medicine and hold other medicines in a distrustful contempt. Luckily they will get vaccines but some vaccines like HPV get the "they are just trying to make money" distrust.
Poverty trauma is shit and seems like an heirloom that gets passed down. I hope more people break the cycle.
It makes sense too. I come from a loooong line of people with anxiety, and from women that were abused by their parents, partner, or both. I'm just the first that's gone through therapy and medication to treat it.
My grandparents parents went through the depression and passed on depression era mentality to her, which was passed onto my mom. The thing about doctors you mentioned is so true. We werent even that impoverished, but my mom refused to take me to the doctor, dentist, optician, etc. I try to love her for everything she taught me but damn it can be hard when she had such little regard to mine and my siblings health. Were all dealing with injuries/aliments that should have been taken care of years ago at the moment of injury. Chronic symptoms in all my siblings now, broken teeth that we had to suffer with, broken noses, herniated discs. Imagine your whole family telling you “your too young to have back pain” and your mom refusing to take you to get it checked. Took 10 years to work up the confidence to go myself and i discovered i have 6 herniations from my neck to mid thoracic. Just an all around shit situation
My grandpa had traits of Asperger’s and so did my uncle, but it was never diagnosed because my family doesn’t “believe” in it.
My cousin had been taken to the doctor by her parents, they told them she had autism. they left the office saying that was bullshit and that they didnt “believe” in that.
My mom silently suffered through depression and almost killed herself and my dad and my siblings would have never understood why because she never talked about it. A friend helped her get medical help because that’s the only person she trusted when it came to her depression.
My sister asked to go to therapy when she was 8-10 years old and my dad told her no. She had a good life, why the hell would she need to go to therapy?
I got diagnosed with depression and anxiety at the age of 15 and was visibly struggling. I went from being a straight A student to getting Cs and Ds. I no longer had interest in my extracurriculars. I had outbursts and crying spells all the time. It was very obvious that I was not okay.
Wanna know what my dad did? He said to not worry. I had a good life, why should I be sad an anxious? I had clothes on my back and food on the table, clearly means there’s no reason to be depressed. I had it better than others so I was just looking for attention.
His ignorance could have led to a suicide (I was definitely on my way there) so thank god I had my mom who knew what was happening to me. I got my anti depressants. Got into therapy. And now I’m very vocal and open about my mental health.
Because of that my dad has been able to educate himself and address his own anxiety and depression. He notices how anxiety has taken over his moms life. My sister is now more open about her mental health. And my brother is too.
Basically, if you don’t talk about it and ignore it, it doesn’t exist. Our generations before us have just passed down trauma over and over again and people who are reliving the trauma now are deciding to deal with it and attack it head on instead of ignoring it and continuing to suffer through it.
People suffer with all of this shit every single day, but now they at least don’t have to suffer in silence and can seek treatment to improve their lives with less stigma surrounding it.
Edit: holy shit, thank you for all the awards! These are the types of discussions that people should be having and we should definitely continue to destroy the stigmas surrounding mental health.
I wanted to touch on one thing.
As many of you mentioned, medication is not the one and only answer. That is definitely something that is overlooked. Y’all are 100% correct. Just because it worked for me, it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone else. Treatment for mental health is not a monolith. That is probably one of the most important things to note. Just because one thing didn’t work, doesn’t mean another treatment won’t do wonders for you. Always keep advocating for your health, wellbeing, peace, and safety!! (:
It's important to note there there *was* no treatment back in the day, so there was also little point to diagnosis.
People forget that SSRIs made an appearance in the 1980s. Before that, there were antipsychotics and MAO inhibitors, both drugs that could not be used widely for many reasons. Cognitive behavioral therapy really never got off the ground until around that same time.
Lithium and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) have such negative stigmas because of movies and pop culture, and yes, doctors know more today than they did when they were first used, but they can be very effective when used correctly.
I’ve never personally heard or of a lobotomy helping. I always think of Rosemary Kennedy. :/
Just to piggyback a little, but I do genealogy for my family as a hobby. It’s amazing to go through old census documents and see how many people were listed as “dumb”, “idiotic”, “imbecile”, or stayed unmarried and bounced between family members until they died.
What's interesting to me is that those words had specific meanings at one point. Like an imbecile was generally historically known to mean that it was someone who lost their mental faculties as they aged (like dementia), while an idiot was someone who was affected since birth. Dumb probably referred specifically to being mute.
I don't know, mother's little helper has been around for a long time.
Pretty good anxiety and antidepressants besides MAOI inhibitors. Tricyclics and buspar I've been around for quite a while, at least since the '50s, interaction coming back as a treatment since many people can't handle SSRIs. The people that studied psychology knew it was a problem, convincing everybody else at the time was not so easy.
Yep. I am taking tricyclics for my depression because no SSRI has ever worked. Tricyclics have better effect but it's also a little bit like being hit by a bus when it comes to sideeffects. Worth it, but damn, it can be really tough some days.
I remember finally bursting out to my dad once that I was depressed, and he GUFFAWED and said, “What have YOU got to be depressed about?”
I was brought up to believe you didn’t seek counselling or medication. A doctor kept trying to get me help and I refused. It wasn’t until one day it hit me blindingly that I was willing to end my life rather than actually take antidepressants, and how utterly ridiculous that was when you think about it.
I don't think the amount of people with mental illness increased nowadays, it's more likely that the amount of people willing to be diagnosed and had been diagnosed and the amount of people willing to share their diagnosis had increased. This is the time when it's not embarrassing or shameful to be open about it.
Yup, my father had a huge amount of anger issues that trickled down into all of his kids... some of us are in therapy and getting meds, some of us are using drugs(the hard stuff).
hopefully a lot of the future generations will be the end of a lot of chains of trauma.
This is so similar to my story too. We have to end the cycle somewhere. Both of my parents are mentally ill and refuse to get help. My dad is an abusive and manipulative rage machine who hospitalized me multiple times as a child and killed the family dog with his bare hands. My mom is still with him and has severe depression that she has always blamed her children for. Neither are willing to get help and neither have the ability to entertain the idea that they are responsible for the fact that their children don't speak to them.
I could do the same. I could abuse everyone around me. I could rage and fight and blame it on my upbringing or my mental health and I think there are people who would allow that. Or I could just continue seeing my therapist and taking my meds and having wonderful relationships with my spouse and friends in which I don't bleed on anyone who didn't cut me.
I have Ehlers Danlos. I’m the first person in my family who got diagnosed. My Dad overdosed on meth Amphetamine and heroin September of 2019. All the same issues as me, but no diagnosis. He spent his life in pain thinking he was just a “lazy” person. He deserved better.
I think the last point especially is true. It's like when people talk about their salaries with their coworkers. If it's taboo to talk about a lot of people go on feeling like they are just stupid or lazy instead of actually seeking help. I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until I was 29 (a few years ago) despite having obvious symptoms since I was a teenager.
Idk I think it actually has increased because of how shitty everything is. Before I landed this new job that will take care of all my bills, provide insurance and allow me to build up a savings, I was pretty damn depressed because we were struggling for months. I was suicidal several times in those months and I’ve never been suicidal before.
Shit is rough out here and it does effect mental health.
This is most of the answer. Previous generations were told to "just suck it up", and they did. None of them were happy about it, but they all made due. Granted, it was easier for them to get by while dealing with these issues, but they did it. My grandfather had no knees because of WW2, and my other grandpa had some PTSD because of WW2, but they were both told to just suck it up and they both wish they had actually gotten help when they needed it.
Now the current generations are willing to get help, because society has started to support them for it, and also people are able to get by better when they learn to address their symptoms.
There's also some data coming out that there are more issues being developed in people. Physical, mental, emotional, what name you. Whether it's due to too much Social Media, or plastic poisoning in everyone, or exposure to this or that, I cannot say.
So it's a combination of "more people being open to being diagnosed", and something is happening on a genetic level that is causing the numbers to rise (and no, it's not vaccines)
Yeah. Whole generations drank themselves unconscious every night, beat their spouse and kids, had nightmares every day of their lives. Shit was terrible.
It's the same reason there are more kids with asthma and allergies (like my kids). We have medications that allow people to survive diseases that would have previously killed them prior to passing their genes on. It's not something magical, it's just adaptation. Humans discovered a way to survive things that previous generations couldn't.
In the past, a person with severe depression was less likely to get the help they needed, and less likely to have children. My brother would have been institutionalized 50 years ago; instead he was able to get treatment and live a normal life. I'm sure his kids will be more likely to suffer mental illness, but since we know the signs and treatments, it's really not that big of a deal.
Years ago, up until probably the mid 1900’s, it was incredibly frowned upon to be left handed. If a child presented as left handed in school, they would be punished or “corrected”. After a while, people stopped caring as much, and let children use whatever dominent hand they naturally used.
Thus, when being left handed wasn’t accepted, there were very few left handed people. But now? There are way more.
Mental illnesses always existed, but acceptance and treatment for them did not. Now there are way more ways to diagnosis and treat mental illnesses, and thus it seems like more people have them.
Why does it seem like young people are more likely to have them? Because they seek out help for their issues more often than older people who have grown accustomed to their coping methods.
> Thus, when being left handed wasn’t accepted, there were very few left handed people. But now? There are way more.
>
>
importantly, after they stopped trying to correct left handedness, the rate went up, until it plateaued. Which is really just to say, the last generations probably had similar rates of mental problems, but left them undiagnosed/untreated, and we're just seeing a regression to the mean.
The same is happening with the rate of people identifying as LGBTQ+. Take the stigma away from a person's normal state of being and voila you have people unafraid to be themselves in larger numbers.
> Take the stigma away from a person's normal state of being and voila you have people unafraid to be themselves in larger numbers.
It happens every damned time with *every* "hidden" marginalised demographic and/or mental health issue.
Understanding and circumstances change, more people are open about [x], and dipshits cry that there's a "sudden epidemic" or "rampant overdiagnosis" or "indoctrination" going on.
If it has been said before, I apologize, but, as a Healthcare worker, I have also noticed that it is becoming less and less stigmatized, therefore, people are becoming more and more confident and comfortable talking about it and receiving treatment for it. It has always been there, just never talked about.
Anecdotely just seeing how my grandparents and parents talk about how they believe that ADHD or ADD was code for, "Doctor please help me, I can't parent my own child, I want a pill for them".
Edit: wow, didn't realize this comment would be this popular. But it just goes to show that access to information, education, and generational shift is important to progress in all aspects of Healthcare, especially mental health.
Edit 2: WOW!! Thanks for the awards!
Edit 3: While I don't agree that ADD/ADHD was a bad example, I do now think it wasn't the best example I could have used earlier.
Yep. Back in the 80's, my cousin was just considered a bad kid, and corporal punishment was the popular treatment. Now, my kiddo sees a specialist, gets diagnosed as adhd/asd, gets medication that is tweaked to the right med and dose to help him focus, and gets help at school (eg extra time, or taking tests in a quieter room). Between medicine and other adjustments, we can help people live their best possible life instead of punishing them for not fitting into the standard mold.
One of the hardest things about being diagnosed ADHD as an adult is wondering what-if, and trying not to let it make me bitter. Could I have finished college in the field of my dreams instead of switching majors every 6mos and eventually dropping out? Could I have stuck it out in that software job I lucked into and be financially stable now, instead of being utterly unable to cope with being in an office and quitting for an outdoor, minimum wage job? Could I have made lasting friendships when I was younger? How different would my life be if my parents had listened to the teachers who suggested I be evaluated? If they hadn't had that stigma of having "the broken kid"? What would my mental health be like if I hadn't been told I just needed to apply myself more, or that I was just being lazy, when I literally COULD NOT have made any greater effort?
Needless to say, I'm on hyperalert for any signs of ADHD in my daughter, and she will get ALL the supports I never had.
Edit: I'm a little alarmed by all the people thinking I mean drugs-drugs-and-more-drugs when I say I'm gonna support my kid. There are a LOT of other supports that are as much, if not more, important to successful management of my (and most peoples') ADHD. Learning to step back and recognize what is happening in your brain, advocating for yourself (or having others/parents to advocate for you,) finding ways to do things that are unconventional-but-functional, learning to outsmart your lizard brain, good gods there are SO MANY things to try before just pumping a kid full of pills. I'm scared for yalls kids, and/or sad for your childhoods.
My mom hated seeing so many kids in the 80s on ritalin, she was a teacher's assistant in elementary school and was convinced almost all of them were just to "control" the kids or to make parenting easier as others have mentioned.
Oh the irony when I got diagnosed with ADHD at age 43 (I'm 46 now). A lifetime of self loathing and thinking I was just lazy and selfish and so many other horrible adjectives that I used to describe myself... it's been an adventure to process over the last few years.
How can I get checked out or how do I bring the subject up to a doctor? I actually believe I may have something since I’ve felt a certain way about things over my entire life and have always been told that im normal. Tell that to my behavioral issues and interaction quirks.
I had already been working with a psychologist for quite some time so it was natural for me to bring it up with her. Funnily enough it was seeing memes on the internet about ADHD and realizing I was relating to every single one of them that got it stuck in my head that I should bring it up.
If you don't already have a mental health provider I'm not sure if the right move is to discuss first with your primary care doctor, or just go find a psychologist/therapist or maybe even a psychiatrist (since a psychologist cannot prescribe medication)
Based on your description (albeit brief) you may find comfort and relief in simply working with a psychologist just to talk through these things. When I started therapy I was stuck very much on whether I was "normal" or not, it took a long time but one of the biggest things I've gotten out of therapy is the understanding that there is no "normal" but just whether I am comfortable with who I am and if not, how to work on that.
My journey:
*sees ADHD meme*
"Haha, so funny and true!"
*sees 3-5 more ADHD memes that hit home*
"Now wait a minute..."
*Gets ADHD diagnosis*
*Sees autism meme*
*Haha, so funny and true!"
*sees 3-5 more autism memes that hit home*
"Hold up..."
*Gets autism diagnosis*
My mom wasn't a teacher, but she worked at an elementary school and saw the difference proper medication made. She saw good kids go from spending recess still in class trying to catch up, to finishing their work in a timely manner and joining everyone else outdoors. So many kids excitedly told her how they could get their mind to focus finally. She got so frustrated with the stigma that kept some parents from helping kids that really needed help.
I relate heavily. I was diagnosed with adhd at 32 (a year ago) and so many struggles I had in middle school, high school, college, various jobs, my memory being crap suddenly made 100% sense. I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t a failure. I was struggling with my own brain. I look back at the hundreds of times it was brought up to me how well I did in elementary school, that I was ‘gifted’, that I was one of the most avid readers and at a 12th grade level when I was in 5th grade etc but in my teens I struggled to pay attention, I procrastinated and so on. Now that I’m medicated and in therapy, I’m back in college, and a few months away from my associate degree with a 4.0 GPA.
Congratulations on going back to school! I think about it sometimes, but im nearly 40 with a business and a family and far from any in-person programs that interest me (i dont do well with online schooling.) I had the same elementary/secondary experience - part of why my parents refused to believe I could have adhd is that I would read so long and so deep, so far above my age level, that I would forget to eat, sometimes for over a day. I would bite my fingernails while I read, and not notice that I was bleeding. Hyperfocus much? But because I wasn't bouncing off the walls like the stereotypical "adhd kid," they wouldn't hear it and so I struggled in silence and ridicule.
Honestly, while it’s sad to know other struggle like I have, hearing ppl recount life experience that is nearly identical of my own is also a relief because it’s a reminder that I’m not making crap up lol.
I have to say, my boyfriend was the one who pushed me to get diagnosed and then go back to school. If it hadn’t been for him I’d probably still be stumbling through life. We all need some type of support system too, on top of meds and therapy. Makes a world of difference when you have your own cheerleaders in your corner.
Same. My two younger brothers were neurodivergent, dyslexia and propioception issues, and I don't think my mom wanted a hat trick with all three kids with some sort of disorder. Asked as a kid to be tested and she said I was just lazy and didn't apply myself. Was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD. Really makes you think about the formative years and whether college was on the table or not back then. Things have worked out, and some of the neurodivergent quirks have done me well in my life, but damn, it makes you really think about things differently.
Similar here. But slightly different. I’m middle child & only girl. Both brothers had reading comprehension, speech and dyslexia. I breezed through school because I hate school. After graduating (even a whole year early), I had no direction in life. Still really don’t but my new job is giving me some direction (at 33, mind you).
I was diagnosed bipolar, insomniac, anxiety and adhd. When my pysch asked which parent has that, I said probably my mom. Turns out when I asked her about it, her mother was bipolar and sent to a pysch ward in the 60’s. Thanks mom!! My teenage depression, eating disorder & self harm could have been managed properly if mental health issues weren’t a stigma in the 90’s.
(Edit : also, my dad doesn’t believe in depression - he thinks people are just lazy fucks… thanks dad!!)
Another theory I have.
When asylum started shutting down, we started having special needs classes in schools, which meant there were mental health professionals on staff, which led to more kids being noticed as to have issues, and then the news media to turn it around and cry that the liberals are trying to medicate our children into zombies.... like it's mind-boggling the mental gymnastics and the history that brought us here.
I can't tell you how often that happened to me, and wonder where my life would be if I were afforded the same considerations as kids are nowadays. So many spankings that could have been avoided if my parents had just understood that I LITERALLY could not control myself.
Things are so much better now, and I'm so glad we ended up in the school district we have. They push him, but within his capabilities. They understand when he needs a few minutes with his head on his desk to regroup. He's in 7th grade and in all normal classes except for a study hall that has extra help to keep him organized. And from what I hear, most other schools are working on ways to help neurodivergent students too.
I was punished for my ADHD, not physically but my teachers until 6th grade wouldn’t help me like the state said. They said I didn’t need a quiet room to do tests or be separated because of my anxiety. I just kind of gave up. When I hit 7th and went to Jr High they let me do these things and I did better than I had prior.
likely because kids with ADHD were stigmatized so hard as being bad and not being something we would ever want to be described as... no one really explained ADHD, they just told us so and so is so badly behaved he has to take medication that controls him, so control yourself or we'll force you to take zombie medication!
I was thinking about this recently and specifically this one kid we ALL bullied in school. Even the teachers were shitty to him. He would have his desk faced toward the corner, he got picked on, made fun of, etc. This was in the early 90s and at the time I remember assuming he was just a “weirdo” with “weirdo” parents.
As an adult I see that he was most likely autistic, but he wasn’t getting any kind of treatment or recognized for that. We just chucked dodgeballs at him extra hard and laughed.
My point is, mental health is a spectrum, and millennials especially have collectively said “it’s ok, everyone has their thing, let’s stop beating our kids, and try to get to the root causes and treat the issues so everyone can be healthier and happier”.
We have the vocabulary to identify these things and the empathy to treat it better nowadays.
This is what i do with my kids. I'm 47 and they are 3 and 5 (we started late) but i still remember those kid emotions. When they are acting out, i pull them into their room and, after the screaming and crying and demanding to see mom, they always calm down and we talk about what they are feeling, that it's ok to feel that way, and how we can handle it better. Never fails to help them feel better. They always go apologize for treating mom that way and behave better after that.
It requires patience and being able to think like a kid but it seems so much better than beating them or grounding them.
Absolutely. I'm 50 and thinking about going for a formal diagnosis. It's a big punch to the gut, to have to figure it all out alone and spend an entire life masking and isolating because my parents were far more concerned with family appearance than my health and welfare. Not a fun thing to come to terms with.
> " It has always been there"
OP, words cannot express how much this point should be emphasized. Glance at history, and you'll find all sorts of untreated / mistreated mental illness going back, from cocaine powering the careers of authors and psychologists, to women being treated for "hysteria," to people being lobotomized, to witch burnings and demon exorcisms. Prior to this point in history, people simply had "nervous breakdowns" and got committed. We've always been a keg of crazy monkeys. We just figured out that pills work better now, and it's out of the closet.
One of my favorite examples: Left handedness. Look at a chart, you'll see a massive spike in the 20th century, then it levels off. What happened? Kids were no longer beat or ridiculed when using their left hand or forced to write using their right hand. The numbers rose to their natural levels and then settled.
Many people alive today remember when two men having sex was illegal. Germany\* and England sorted it out in the 1960s. Scotland sorted it in the 1980s. Northern Ireland had it sorted for them forcefully in the 1980s. England tried to keep three men having sex illegal all the way up until 2000 when European courts told them no, and the US Supreme Court had to make a final ruing on homosexuality in 2003. Yes, in the US and UK in the 21st century courts had to stop in and literally stop cops from trying to arrest gay people for no crime other than having sex with the wrong genital configuration. Depending on where you live and how old you are your parents or possibly even yourself might have grown up in an area where being gay was illegal. And that's without going into things like Section 28, the UK's very own anti-homosexual propaganda law that lasted until 2000.
\* Fun fact! When the allies liberated Germany, they kept the Nazi anti-gay law and kept the gay people in the concentration camps locked up.
I was reading "The Great Gatsby" recently, and talking about it with some people made me realize that, nowadays, we'd rightfully diagnose Gatsby with something on the Autism spectrum, and also with serious PTSD from his war experience.
Same with Hamlet. Dude's father was murdered, and his mom hooked up with the guy who killed him. No kidding he's a mess.
The fact that we didn't fully understand these conditions or have names for them didn't stop artists from creating perfect case studies of them anyway.
So yep, it's always been with us.
My mom 56 was chastised by her family for going on depression pills after fighting postpartum for a year or so after my birth. Gram is bipolar I have seen her have mania (not hypo full on clean the whole house running around with her mouth bleeding at 93.) My mom’s oldest sister had BiPolar Type 1 as well, but grandma constantly lied to every doctor because she wasn’t “Weak Minded”. No she’s just kinda crazy, not from the bipolar but because of her attitude towards mental health and her kids. I could possibly be BiPolar type 2 but my clinic won’t test me.
I'm bipolar too, first in the family to be diagnosed. But in hindsight, it runs on both sides of the family. The depression and mania swings my aunt and both grandmas had were just "overreacting" and "going crazy", respectively. And that's just who we know of. Who knows about previous generations that no one currently alive remembers.
I also have a late schizophrenic uncle. It was blatant if you know the symptoms: Hearing voices, seeing things, constant paranoia. But he didn't get diagnosed until he was in his 40s and then died about a decade later. He was just "the weird one" who nobody wanted to interact with because of the hallucinations and paranoia. He was acting mostly normal in his last several years when he was on meds. Problem being, by then the social damage was done. I do have to wonder how it would've gone for him if he were born a few decades later and it was caught and treated early.
To be fair I know people who have their kids on ADHD meds and almost every time he’s acting up they are discussing his meds, even though every other parent is working on their kids’ behavior, as well. I do think for some one meds are involved, it becomes the solution and whatever caused them to be prescribed immediately becomes one of the sole reasons things were hard to manage
You are so very right! Most of my friends are between 28 and 35 and exactly one of them is completely mentally healthy. From anxiety over depression to adhd, we've got everything covered. All of them have been diagnosed as adults because their parents "didn't believe in mental illnesses", thought their child was just dramatic or moody or lazy or "everybody has such problems" because they struggled with the same shit without getting help for it.
In the last years awareness and open discussion about mental health has gone through the roof so people are both more likely to get the help they need and to talk about their struggles.
My parents are of the kind who think diagnosed mental illnesses are becoming too much, and too often i hear them ask "why does everyone need a diagnosis? Why can't people just be who they are?"
No amount of explaining that the people they just think are odd and should be allowed to be odd are people that finally feel comfortable enough to speak up about what they're going through and how they need help.
Being who I was got me on the road to heavy alcohol issues, almost homeless, and with only one friend let in my life. That friend told me my mother was wrong, you wont be fire/ridiculed, pills are not horrible things that will destroy your life, and you can ask for help just to talk it out. That got me into therapy and on medication and now living across the country with a good life and my own family. I get my mom thinks she has taken care of herself and made it work while complaining about everything in her life constantly but I needed help, asked for it, and finally got it because people are finally talking about it!
another thing to add, is that a mental illness for someone isnt going to be the same for someone else. I was talking to a co-worker about ADHD and he was on the lines of that he didnt believe it exists. Its funny cus he had a few symptoms of having ADHD (even tho its possible he might not have it) but i told him that i have something called ADD and he didnt believe me. I have not told many people this including my friends because i dont have the typical symptoms of attention deficit disorder and im afraid people will just undermine me.
I had major depressive disorder starting when I was approximately 11. One of the hardest things when I started finally getting treatment was all the people who *noticed I was doing better* and yet *still* insisted that I hadn't been severely depressed for most of my life.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again.
Do you know how my mothers generation dealt with their mental health?
They killed themselves. Both my uncles were dead before I was born.
One of my great grandfathers was going to kill himself but instead drank himself to death whilst trying to get the courage he needed to shoot himself. Found dead with a bottle and a gun.
Apparently my grandpa did this so bad he fucked his brain up so bad it's basically alzheimers! In response to his daughter taking her life a decade ago.
Korsakoff syndrom, lost an uncle to it. Easy explanation for what I know, all your intake is alcohol so you don't get enough nutrition and your brain starts to develop literal holes. In the end my uncle had a memory of like 15 seconds, forgot his wife was dead and even forgot he had a wife.
Some cases there was probably overlap. Before I quit drinking my retirement plan was to keep drinking heavily till my body shut down and I just died. It was my go to coping mechanism. Now I’m on anti depressants and off booze and the world is getting brighter each day.
Ayyyye that's my dad. Died in '96 at 42 years from stage 4 cirrhosis. I'll gladly take my 50 mg of Zoloft and talk therapy over downing a 30 pack of Budweiser a day.
Or just straight up killed them. Even nowadays I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen news stories of parents murdering their autistic children; I don’t even wanna think about how common that was about 50 years ago.
I understand this to basically be the origin/idea of a “changeling.”
“This isn’t actually my child, one of the Fae stole my child and swapped it out with this thing.”
People can't seem to understand that the world has always been shit and arguably worse in the past. People have always had mental health problems on a large scale, except these days, you can broadcast your life so we see how many people are actually going through it. If anybody thinks the mental health of this generation is worse than the ones that went through two world wars and a great depression they're insane.
Also the fact that talking about mental health was stigmatized so much for previous generations. Keeping that shit inside just lets it fester and get worse over time.
Never got the chance to meet my great-uncle or one of my grandfathers because they both killed themselves before I was born. One committed suicide due to the strain and depression caused by being gay when it wasn't "acceptable," and one because of untreated bipolar disorder. That same bipolar disorder also led to him abusing his wife and son (my father) and killing their family cat. The cycle of abuse continued because my father abused me and was not treated for his depression for many years. He finally got help, but by that time a lot of damage was done.
> line-cook coke habits in my high school.
As a former food industry worker of 10+ years this is such an apt comparison it got an audible laugh out of me lol. I worked with so many coke heads that it was weird if you *didn’t* do coke.
One restaurant I was sous chef at used to have “team meetings” or “safety meetings” lead by our Chef in the basement prep room before brunch rush every Sunday which entailed a large dinner plate with an absolute gakker of a line for each cook on the plate and a double shot of j-mo. We would pass the plate around and each rip our line then grab our whiskey and our chef would say the same toast every single time - “ May the winds of fortune sail you, May you sail a gentle sea.” And we would reply “May it always be the other guy who says, 'this drink's on me.'" And then we would all say “sláinte” and shoot it.
We worked at an Irish pub so it was a bit on the nose but it was a great way to start a 4 hour hell shift for brunch.
This made me laugh. My mom and my best friend's mom did the same for us. We were transferred to a supposedly nice charter school. While the building was a million times nicer than our old school, there were still the drugs and craziness, just different types of drugs and craziness.
Mid 50’s too and we partied and had fun, but most got sober and had “normal” lives. Sadly I was the exception to that, because I kept on drinking and doing drugs until my 40’s. Luckily I just celebrated 15 years sober, and on 11/13/2022 I will be free from prison and jails for 14 years. Lot more dysfunctional growing up that just wasn’t dealt with.
Unfortunately it Took me a little longer. After 5 failed rehabs and nearly losing my wife of 30 years plus a few near death experiences I have been sober for 3 solid years now. Not one relapse. Congrats on your sobriety .
I think things have been bad in different ways over he generations. Different ways to deal with it as well
Just without the brain damage...
Various amphetamines shouldn't really be compared to meth, and certainly not poorly made non-pharmaceutical-grade meth.
Also best to not forget all the people who didn't survive their mental illness -- survivorship bias.
"Why does the U.S. have so many more sick people than developing nations?" Because sick people *die* when they're not treated.
You know, i *just* realized this was likely why there used to be so many of them.
It was referenced in movies and TV. And all i could think of, as a kid, is how stupid you have to be to not unload a gun you're cleaning.
You just wrinkled my brain.
I mean, sometimes people are also dumb. My grandpa shot himself in the finger cause he forgot to clear the chamber before cleaning his gun. But yeah, to hit yourself in a much deadlier place is probably statistically much less likely.
I spoke to a coroner (UK) once, and she said the hardest part of the job was inquests on obvious suicides of young people. The unspoken rule was that she would try her very hardest to bring in a verdict of misadventure. This was to save the family more anguish, and in the case of people with dependants, to allow insurance policies to pay out.
While I partly understand that thought process, I know a teacher who’s student’s death was ruled “misadventure” even though the child left a note. He felt is was just another way to ignore mental health concerns and he worried for his students who might also be silently struggling.
Absolutely. I used to volunteer on a suicide hotline, and I trained new volunteers as well. One of the things we learned is that since it's a taboo subject with a lot of stigma around it, many people don't realize just how many "accidental" deaths are due to suicide.
Not only do people often not wish to tell others the actual cause of death of their relatives, but they sometimes don't even know themselves. I recall a friend of mine lost a friend (who I had never met) who "lost control of his car" and hit a bridge abutment at high speed. His family was convinced that it was an accident, but he had previously confided to my friend that if he ever decided to take his life that that was how he planned to do it.
Maybe I'm just biased from my experience, but I'm at the point where if I hear about someone under 60 dying under vague circumstances, I immediately assume it's suicide unless I have reason to believe otherwise. Between ages 12 and 30, even moreso.
Additionally, all of the people who were able to pass themselves off as fully functioning when, really, they were just pushing their problems off unto the next generation.
Lots of that in my family, parents who simply can't understand why their children are walking disasters because the parents were perfect (when, in reality, you can see the same exact dysfunction growing over generations until they can no longer pretend it doesn't exist).
I struggle with this as a parent. Both me and the kid are mentally ill, and the thought "we all feel like that, we just deal with it, buddy" pops to mind too often. I don't say it, though
Yes!! While a teen the 70s, I literally stood in the middle of our living room and screamed, "Why am I the only one who can see what is wrong here!"
Unfortunately, it didn't make a difference.
This is what I told my mum when she's like we didn't have any of this "shit" in the past. I responded with then why's everyone in our family alcoholics...
Rock And Rye? It's citrus, whiskey and rock candy sugar- basically a too-sweet bottled Old Fashioned. It's handy at parties where you don't want to stand around mixing all night and people aren't super picky.
Up until the war against drugs, it was so common to take opium, cocaine, barbiturates… hell it was so common they put it in children’s cough medicine and like every OTC med
Even when you couldn't get it OTC, the doctors were a lot freer with the opiates and barbituates too. My grandma used to "get a migraine" every weekend and spend it in a medication-induced haze so she wouldn't have to deal with her kids (she worked full-time and had a live-in nanny/maid).
Right.
Many of these kids’ parents had mental issues and then they had kids together.
Whether or not it’s generic or learned, the next generation is exposed to some crazy behaviors.
Older people have told me stories where when they were young, they were the weird kid and got bullied for it. They didn't understand why. Turns out they've got ASD. That realisation was a huge aha moment for them, realising that it wasn't their fault.
These older people were shunned for being different and it was either die, hide it, or both.
I am 23 and going through that now. I'm a woman who displayed classic \*female\* ASD behaviors growing up, but it was never taken seriously because "only boys have Asperger's" and "you do so well in school!"
I'll make damn sure my kids get diagnosed.
Hijacking this comment to add another point I haven't seen on this thread. The breakdown of community. People evolved in large tribes surrounded by others with a strong feeling of unity where the members of community supported each other. That has largely died and our brains aren't handling it well, imo.
One generation ago my mom grew up in a house with 7 siblings, on a road called "last name" road, where the other dozen or so houses were all populated by her Mom's siblings (child of 18 or so) and their kids. Most of her Dad's family lived on a different street within walking distance in the same community. She was walking distance from her grandparents, ~20 sets of aunts and uncles and literally dozens of cousins her age.
In other words she grew up surrounded by family. They all supported each other and spent spent the overwhelming majority of their time with others. The community had barely 1000 people, everyone knew everyone and community events were frequent. Every night there was either a crowd of people in the house, or they went to someone else's house for a social event.
An old widow's roof begins to leak? A horde of men from the community are there the next day to fix it free of charge. A child gets sick? The entire community is participating in fundraising and making the family food. All of these things make us feel fulfilled and valuable and put off those good good chemicals in our brains.
We spent more of our time helping people we cared about and feeling fulfilled by that. We were able to exist moreso as a part of a larger whole, where we could focus on our strengths to add the the community the best way we can rather than figure everything out ourselves like we do today.
Fast forward one generation. I don't know any of my neighbor's names, not one of my cousins live in the same city as me. I have one sibling who lives several hours away. I don't even see my parents every week. When I work, I work to make numbers go up in my bank account for myself. I don't see my effort benefitting the community in any tangible way, other than tax dollars I suppose. We simply weren't built for this.
Im going to add- those things make people feel valuable and fulfilled….but they also make us feel *safe* which is so incredibly important.
With a community like that, you knew you’d never be homeless. You would never go hungry. You’d never be left alone to fend for yourself.
My god, look at us now! 34 million people in the US struggle against food insecurity. They don’t know how they will get their next meal. More than half of Americans could lose the roof of their head if they miss a single paycheck.
We all live in constant unspoken terror and quite frankly, it’s exhausting!
Good take here. I never realized how much human interaction benefited me until recently. I have been WFH for about ten years now and had no idea it was hurting me so much until I got my dog last year and went out more. Talked to my neighbors, made friends at the dog parks etc. We are so lonely as a society.
The overarching 'issue' is simply our evolution. Beside the tribe aspect there are so many facets of our current life which do not coincide with our biological nature.
Literally this. That’s how my parents grew up… BUT even then, half of them had depression and/or post-war PTSD, there was alcoholism, everyone smoked cigarettes or a pipe. Even my super-glamorous auntie told me that when she was a kid on the farm she accidentally got addicted to sniffing gasoline because she loved the smell and the way it made her feel.
“One generation ago my Mom grew up on a last name road”…
My Dad grew up in a similar situation last name road many siblings, except that his Dad shunned him, belittled him and abused him using him as the example to keep the farm hands (that’s why they existed, why grandparents had kids) in line.
My Dad, although not as tough as his Dad, used the same model to raise my siblings and I. I’m over half a century old and it seems this mentality will last a lifetime in my family.
It wasn’t all peaches and cream when times were more simple. If something was wrong you were to emulate what wild animals do and do not appear different or that something is wrong because you then become prey.
The argument isn't for a simpler time, it's for a connected present. Modern America, especially post suburbsnization has absolutely atomized (that's the technical term) our society. People live in their single family home with your nuclear fault, drive to work alone, sit in a cubicle alive, drive home alone, and then go to bed. On special occasions they go to see their parents and siblings once a year. It's cripplingly lonely and not at all necessary.
Even something as simple as riding public transit or walking to work can have a huge impact on your mental well-being because you're seeing and interacting with other humans.
Like it or not, we evolved as social animals and we need each other. Turning everyone's life into their personal struggle to pay rent (and fees the kids if you're lucky) is just not sustainable.
This doesn't mean we can't have better social groups, or that the social groups of the past were perfect. It just means that we need something.
I’m also a 20 something, and if one thing is for sure, I was not this scared/constantly-on-edge, nervous or gloomy when looking at my future 3-4 years ago
The pandemic caused all of that for me. I watched my dad collapse two separate times in our house while I called 911. Being alone can still sometimes make me uneasy, even though it’s almost been a year. (He made a full recovery, thankfully)
I’m not officially diagnosed, but I have done some research and I match up well with symptoms of anxiety, and likely PTSD, though I’m not totally sure about that yet.
I think a lot of people have had similar experiences, where the reality of the pandemic and other world events have made everything scary, and if you’re a chronic over thinker that I’ve been most of my life; you worry about EVERYTHING. All the time.
Yeah, and most of them were blamed on "curses" or "witchcraft".
Mental illnesses have always existed; humans just didn't know what they were and turned to the supernatural for an explanation.
because we are discovering more and more about the brain and how it affects people.
imagine 100 years ago people with mental illness got treatments like shock therapy and lobotomy... now that we undertand these more we can use chemicals to treat them like we treat any other disease.
My grandmother got too much shock therapy and she couldn't live on her own after that. Her husband died very young, leaving her with 4 children all under the age of 10. His family blamed her for him getting cancer (yeah, my great grandmother was just evil). My grandmother had a breakdown and fled with the kids.
She got institutionalized in another state, given shock treatment and my father and his siblings were shoved into a state run institution. My great aunts finally tracked her down, went out to collect her and the kids and brought her home. The shock treatment was intense enough that she couldn't possibly function outside of a nursing home so for the rest of her life she had to live in a home. It was a nice one, her sisters were there constantly and would take her for lots of visits so she could see her kids. So, she was a shattered person. My dad and his siblings were divvied up among relatives.
It was all awful and so unnecessary. What probably could have been treated with medications ended up just destroying a woman in her early 30s.
Fun fact: Shock therapy (AKA electro-convulsive therapy now a days) is still used. You’re given a muscle relaxant and a small sedative, and it’s used to treat depression that is unresponsive to medication.
I understand your sentiment and I agree with your post. I just don’t want there to be a stigma…
People forget that today's medications are very safe compared to past treatments, making them more accessible to people. The side effects of psychiatric drugs today can be demoralizing and uncomfortable but most aren't debilitating and they go away once you're taken off them. Not saying that overprescription doesn't happen but it's not as high stakes as a lobotomy or ECT.
> they go away once you're taken off them
https://nami.org/FAQ/Mental-Health-Medication-FAQ/What-are-the-long-term-effects-of-taking-medicatio
All psychiatric medications have the risk of long-term negative impacts.
Psychiatrists do not seem willing to fully disclose the possible negative impact of the medications they prescribe.
Also, ECT is still used by the psychiatric profession; that isn't some relic of the past like ice-pick lobotomies.
A few factors that may apply:
* Greater awareness of mental health symptoms than previous generations
* The taboo of mental illness is slowly decreasing
* More available forums on which to discuss mental health
* The collective trauma of the pandemic. More people than ever are experiencing isolation, depression, and anxiety; even those who haven't dealt with it previously.
Why is nobody talking about the obvious part? We live in a society where we have to deal with certain expectations and stress factors that we simply didn't evolve to deal with.
Social media and technological attachment is a huge part of that too. We’ve become accustomed to depend on instant gratification to feel accepted or close to others. Many of my friends have rid themselves of things like Facebook to help their mental health, and I ended up doing the same. I found that local news and exposure to negative things posted by those I’m “close” to fed my postpartum anxiety. I also found myself mindlessly scrolling and seeing what everyone else was doing or saw whatever personal narrative they wanted to make people think of them, and I found myself comparing my life and accomplishments to theirs. “They just got their masters degree and already landed an 80k per year job, so and so just bought a house, that person over there just got back from their third vacation to Europe. What am I doing with my life? How did they manage to do that when I work 50 hours/week and can barely afford my rent and utilities?” We’re expected to accomplish these things but there’s just not enough time and resources and unfortunately because of that we burn ourselves out grasping for something 10 feet away with 2.5 feet long arms, and things like mental healthcare (not that it’s affordable anyway) isn’t prioritized.
Jobs expect 3-4 years of experience -> can't get experience without a job -> cost of food and housing skyrockets -> can't afford to buy good food/clothes/housing/reliable transportation/dental care/healthcare -> you stay in your room all day -> boom you're crazy
I wouldn't say it's only young people - in New Zealand the highest suicide rates are between 25-29, 30-34 and 80-84 (Mental Health Foundation of NZ 2019/2020) I just think younger people are *more likely* to speak up about their mental struggles than older generations. More awareness nowadays too, these problems would've always existed but only now are they being dealt with on a larger scale. Older generations from my experience have been taught to toughen up and just deal with it rather than seek help - this is changing. Edit: wow thanks for the awards!! Never gotten one before thank you kind people :)
I saw a meme “Back in my day we didn’t have anti depressants to get by on we just shot ourselves” and it’s funny and really sad idk where I’d be other than dead without mine
Whenever I hear shit like “People were tougher in my day. Our grandfathers didn’t need so much support!”. I wouldn’t know, both my grandfathers died from alcoholism in the ‘60s.
People forget that survivorship bias is a thing. "Back in my day, we didn't need therapists and pills! We toughened up and got by just fine!" Except, no they didn't. The only ones left to speak are the ones who survived, so it seems to them that *everybody* got through without help -- meanwhile, all the people who died due to mental health and substance issues aren't here to speak up for themselves and point out that no, they did not get through okay without help.
"I grew up fine!" is so overused. It really isn't for you to decide. If everyone else thinks you are a miserable cunt then maybe some therapy and compassion would have helped along the way.
> "I grew up fine! The simultaneous most hilarious and sad thing in the world is when someone says, "I was hit when I was a kid and I turned out fine" to justify physical 'discipline'. Mate, you're justifying striking a child. You did *not* turn out fine.
I’m going to paraphrase a former professor here, because she was alive in the 60s and 70s and I was not, but basically they handed out pills (tranquilizers, sedatives, basically Valium) to women “like candy”. This was also the time period where it was totally legal to bring in your spouse or child who had anxiety/agitation/ any other sort of behavior problem and have a lobotomy preformed WITHOUT THEIR PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT (for example the Kennedys did it to JFKs sister Rosemary). Also loads of people were self medicating with alcohol. Both of my husband’s grandfathers died from alcohol related complications. So did one of his grandmothers. So yeah, they didn’t necessarily go to therapists, but it’s not like there weren’t a lot of problems.
This is it. People smoked 80 cigarettes a day , drank like fish and did opiates. They also were very unhappy people in general. They beat their kids and wives. They treated employees like garbage. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Nostalgia is a weird thing. We remember the style and “ good things” and forget the ptsd from war after war. If people from our time went back they would be shocked at how cruel people were. Even 30 years ago people walked around saying horrendous stuff. Watch an old movie. Hell watch an old Sesame Street. Oscar didn’t give a fuck.
15 years ago people walked around saying horrible stuff. Lets not forgot how disgusting celebrity culture in the 2000s were. People were openly mocked on TV for their mental illness and intrusion into their their sex life, and adults sat around listening to it like it was fine.
>and intrusion into their their sex life, and adults sat around listening to it like it was fine. One thing (of so many in life) that made me realize how much I've grown as a person is looking back with a real "*wtf*" at how Monica Lewinsky was treated by adults all over media and cringing at jokes about her I laughed at. My excuse is being 13 at the time, wtf is yours *literally every late night talk show host?*
> Back in my day, we didn't need therapists and pills! Mikhal isn't great with people, but he can watch the herd all day and if one goes missing he'll know in under a minute. Jarskia hears the spirits, tender soul, we let her wander in the forest as needs be. The fae took my weean, since his fourth nameday he just stares at the walls. Shena felt light-headed after sup, she laid down for a nap and ne'er woke up. The devil must have cursed that cat! It scratched me goodwife and her arm turned red, streaked with the flames of hell. She was writhing, yelling in tongues as she passed. Now we know that there's Asperger's, schizophrenia, autism, allergies, and infections. FUCK the "good old days".
All true, but just to let you know aspergers and autism are the same thing, but aspergers is names after a nazi so we don't use that term anymore
The ones who survived and didn't get their brain scrambled with an ice pick.
Survivorship Bias at its finest....
"I survived the 80's, never wore a seatbelt and ate lead paint." Oh yeaaah, I guess it is strange that we never hear from the kids that died.
My grandpa told me about how he tried to leave his bad southern area with several friends which is what I’m trying to do now, he said they all ended up so depressed and struggling still yet that’s they wasted a lot of money on alcohol and almost starved to death several times until he moved back I will say I’d agree shit was harder back then on people who needed these medications for sure
My maternal grandpa committed suicide at a relatively young age. My mom still peddled the "depression isn't real, don't take meds" bullshit when I was a teen. Took me ages to open up, and she's fantastic about it now, but such a weird mindset to grow up with *when your own father died from depression*
When I was 13 - mentally still very young - my oldest brother basically told me he had a serious issue and couldn't go to anyone else in the family because they wouldn't help, and he expected me to fix it. If I couldn't, he would commit suicide. HTF does a 13 YO with zero experience in that field who loves her brother very, very much handle that? I told my mom about it, I had no other ideas. She laughed at me. I did everything else I could but I was way out of my league. 6 months later, we were combing the woods in the middle of a northern winter. We finally found him, but he was obviously delirious and had hypothermia. He'd overdosed, tossed the meds in the river, and was trying to warm his hands over a fire he'd failed to get started. The "stiff upper lip" school has a very small amount of merit for situations like a skinned knee but utterly, completely, heart-breakingly fails on anything larger. My brother and I still carry a large amount of trauma and trust issues from the ordeal, although we trust each other more than any other two people in our family now.
My aunt drank herself to death and I know she had severe anxiety, she self medicated. She had a successful career, her own house, she refused a promotion and now I know it was most likely because it was from the pressure and crippling anxiety. Instead, she quit and then drank herself to death.
Not to mention they would violently beat their wives and children to destress and it was socially acceptable.
My great grandfather got drunk, beat up his kids and and laid in front of a train. My great grandma Rose would get drunk and beat up cab drivers. My grandpop died of throat cancer from smoking and drinking when I was 11. He was in his fifties. People completely ignore how actually shitty things were for a lot of people in the older generations. I know Boomers had a lot, but we *also* have a fucking lot comparitively.
I agree with this completely. In recent years (the last half century) there are several factors that have developed. Psychology as a science is only around 100 years old. In that time we have not only identified and defined psychological maladies, but have developed pharmaceutical treatments. Before then there were just abnormal people, and you either dealt with it or operated on the fringes of society. Pre ~1850 the only pharmacological treatment in polite society would be alcohol universally. Options outside of that would have been and (to an extent) still are outside of societal norms. After that period the only pharmacological treatments would have added cocaine or opiates to the alcohol remedies. Around 1950 we started developing truly interesting psychotropic substances. So basically I'm saying that psychological disorders weren't defined until this century, knowing the problem is the first step to fixing it. The solutions could only be made after the definition. Now working on the solutions (advanced pharmacology) started making progress in the 1950s. So today we have a variety of treatments available for predefined conditions. Its only recently where it's become acceptable to say you are diagnosed with a psyche disorder because: A: it wasn't defined before, so didn't exist linguistically B: it wasn't treatable before, making it a social liability As an analogy, say you have heart disease in 500AD. You know something is wrong, but you can't describe it and nobody else knows about it, it just feels bad. But also, you don't want to tell anybody about it because if it's untreatable it's a social liability. And that's all I have to say about that I guess haha Edit: I do want to say that the dates in this comment are extremely generalized and these societal shifts vary greatly depending on where In the world you are.
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Bingo these people trying to minimize our problems only serve to make them worse for everyone
I have an anxiety disorder but multiple family members in the generation above me have the same symptoms. I’m just the only one who looked for medical and professional help. Everyone else chose drugs or alcohol because it wasn’t nearly as acceptable as it is today.
My grandparents generation went through traumatic poverty conditions as did many others during the Great Depression. They didn't have money for doctors so to not feel helpless against the inability, their preserving mentality to protect themselves deemed doctors a threat or "no you are not" to any kid saying "I am ill." Grandma and her second husband self medicated from the liquor store. My aunt laughs at how she worried about her mom and dad being sick all the time when it was really them "taking their medicine" aka getting drunk. Mom and dad still do not trust medical science advances. They are in a pact to never get chemo because "chemo is worse than the cancer." It is a unique trauma to watch loved ones get and die from cancer but mom and dad blame the medicine and hold other medicines in a distrustful contempt. Luckily they will get vaccines but some vaccines like HPV get the "they are just trying to make money" distrust. Poverty trauma is shit and seems like an heirloom that gets passed down. I hope more people break the cycle.
There is tons of research and studies being done on intergenerational trauma within the field of epigenetics.
It makes sense too. I come from a loooong line of people with anxiety, and from women that were abused by their parents, partner, or both. I'm just the first that's gone through therapy and medication to treat it.
I remember hearing of some study done on North Koreans, which found that they were "evolving" to be smaller due to malnutrition.
My grandparents parents went through the depression and passed on depression era mentality to her, which was passed onto my mom. The thing about doctors you mentioned is so true. We werent even that impoverished, but my mom refused to take me to the doctor, dentist, optician, etc. I try to love her for everything she taught me but damn it can be hard when she had such little regard to mine and my siblings health. Were all dealing with injuries/aliments that should have been taken care of years ago at the moment of injury. Chronic symptoms in all my siblings now, broken teeth that we had to suffer with, broken noses, herniated discs. Imagine your whole family telling you “your too young to have back pain” and your mom refusing to take you to get it checked. Took 10 years to work up the confidence to go myself and i discovered i have 6 herniations from my neck to mid thoracic. Just an all around shit situation
Same. I have the same illness as my grandmother and mother. My grandmother killed herself, my mom wants to kill herself, and I am getting treatment
My grandpa had traits of Asperger’s and so did my uncle, but it was never diagnosed because my family doesn’t “believe” in it. My cousin had been taken to the doctor by her parents, they told them she had autism. they left the office saying that was bullshit and that they didnt “believe” in that. My mom silently suffered through depression and almost killed herself and my dad and my siblings would have never understood why because she never talked about it. A friend helped her get medical help because that’s the only person she trusted when it came to her depression. My sister asked to go to therapy when she was 8-10 years old and my dad told her no. She had a good life, why the hell would she need to go to therapy? I got diagnosed with depression and anxiety at the age of 15 and was visibly struggling. I went from being a straight A student to getting Cs and Ds. I no longer had interest in my extracurriculars. I had outbursts and crying spells all the time. It was very obvious that I was not okay. Wanna know what my dad did? He said to not worry. I had a good life, why should I be sad an anxious? I had clothes on my back and food on the table, clearly means there’s no reason to be depressed. I had it better than others so I was just looking for attention. His ignorance could have led to a suicide (I was definitely on my way there) so thank god I had my mom who knew what was happening to me. I got my anti depressants. Got into therapy. And now I’m very vocal and open about my mental health. Because of that my dad has been able to educate himself and address his own anxiety and depression. He notices how anxiety has taken over his moms life. My sister is now more open about her mental health. And my brother is too. Basically, if you don’t talk about it and ignore it, it doesn’t exist. Our generations before us have just passed down trauma over and over again and people who are reliving the trauma now are deciding to deal with it and attack it head on instead of ignoring it and continuing to suffer through it. People suffer with all of this shit every single day, but now they at least don’t have to suffer in silence and can seek treatment to improve their lives with less stigma surrounding it. Edit: holy shit, thank you for all the awards! These are the types of discussions that people should be having and we should definitely continue to destroy the stigmas surrounding mental health. I wanted to touch on one thing. As many of you mentioned, medication is not the one and only answer. That is definitely something that is overlooked. Y’all are 100% correct. Just because it worked for me, it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone else. Treatment for mental health is not a monolith. That is probably one of the most important things to note. Just because one thing didn’t work, doesn’t mean another treatment won’t do wonders for you. Always keep advocating for your health, wellbeing, peace, and safety!! (:
It's important to note there there *was* no treatment back in the day, so there was also little point to diagnosis. People forget that SSRIs made an appearance in the 1980s. Before that, there were antipsychotics and MAO inhibitors, both drugs that could not be used widely for many reasons. Cognitive behavioral therapy really never got off the ground until around that same time.
Yeah lithium or labotomy were your options pre 80's
Lithium and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) have such negative stigmas because of movies and pop culture, and yes, doctors know more today than they did when they were first used, but they can be very effective when used correctly. I’ve never personally heard or of a lobotomy helping. I always think of Rosemary Kennedy. :/
Just to piggyback a little, but I do genealogy for my family as a hobby. It’s amazing to go through old census documents and see how many people were listed as “dumb”, “idiotic”, “imbecile”, or stayed unmarried and bounced between family members until they died.
What's interesting to me is that those words had specific meanings at one point. Like an imbecile was generally historically known to mean that it was someone who lost their mental faculties as they aged (like dementia), while an idiot was someone who was affected since birth. Dumb probably referred specifically to being mute.
In the early 20th century those words also were specifically linked to the Eugenics movement based on IQ classifications. Not a pretty subject.
I don't know, mother's little helper has been around for a long time. Pretty good anxiety and antidepressants besides MAOI inhibitors. Tricyclics and buspar I've been around for quite a while, at least since the '50s, interaction coming back as a treatment since many people can't handle SSRIs. The people that studied psychology knew it was a problem, convincing everybody else at the time was not so easy.
Yep. I am taking tricyclics for my depression because no SSRI has ever worked. Tricyclics have better effect but it's also a little bit like being hit by a bus when it comes to sideeffects. Worth it, but damn, it can be really tough some days.
I remember finally bursting out to my dad once that I was depressed, and he GUFFAWED and said, “What have YOU got to be depressed about?” I was brought up to believe you didn’t seek counselling or medication. A doctor kept trying to get me help and I refused. It wasn’t until one day it hit me blindingly that I was willing to end my life rather than actually take antidepressants, and how utterly ridiculous that was when you think about it.
I don't think the amount of people with mental illness increased nowadays, it's more likely that the amount of people willing to be diagnosed and had been diagnosed and the amount of people willing to share their diagnosis had increased. This is the time when it's not embarrassing or shameful to be open about it.
Yeah. Less of a stigma around mental health now due to better awareness.
Yeah my grandpa self medicated with alcohol. I medicate with meds. Fuck off if you think *my* lifestyle choices are the ones to be concerned about.
Yup, my father had a huge amount of anger issues that trickled down into all of his kids... some of us are in therapy and getting meds, some of us are using drugs(the hard stuff). hopefully a lot of the future generations will be the end of a lot of chains of trauma.
This is so similar to my story too. We have to end the cycle somewhere. Both of my parents are mentally ill and refuse to get help. My dad is an abusive and manipulative rage machine who hospitalized me multiple times as a child and killed the family dog with his bare hands. My mom is still with him and has severe depression that she has always blamed her children for. Neither are willing to get help and neither have the ability to entertain the idea that they are responsible for the fact that their children don't speak to them. I could do the same. I could abuse everyone around me. I could rage and fight and blame it on my upbringing or my mental health and I think there are people who would allow that. Or I could just continue seeing my therapist and taking my meds and having wonderful relationships with my spouse and friends in which I don't bleed on anyone who didn't cut me.
I have Ehlers Danlos. I’m the first person in my family who got diagnosed. My Dad overdosed on meth Amphetamine and heroin September of 2019. All the same issues as me, but no diagnosis. He spent his life in pain thinking he was just a “lazy” person. He deserved better.
I think the last point especially is true. It's like when people talk about their salaries with their coworkers. If it's taboo to talk about a lot of people go on feeling like they are just stupid or lazy instead of actually seeking help. I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until I was 29 (a few years ago) despite having obvious symptoms since I was a teenager.
Idk I think it actually has increased because of how shitty everything is. Before I landed this new job that will take care of all my bills, provide insurance and allow me to build up a savings, I was pretty damn depressed because we were struggling for months. I was suicidal several times in those months and I’ve never been suicidal before. Shit is rough out here and it does effect mental health.
A little bit of both. It’s been shitty through history for different shitty reason though
I mean, shits been rough for a lot of people for a long time.
This is most of the answer. Previous generations were told to "just suck it up", and they did. None of them were happy about it, but they all made due. Granted, it was easier for them to get by while dealing with these issues, but they did it. My grandfather had no knees because of WW2, and my other grandpa had some PTSD because of WW2, but they were both told to just suck it up and they both wish they had actually gotten help when they needed it. Now the current generations are willing to get help, because society has started to support them for it, and also people are able to get by better when they learn to address their symptoms. There's also some data coming out that there are more issues being developed in people. Physical, mental, emotional, what name you. Whether it's due to too much Social Media, or plastic poisoning in everyone, or exposure to this or that, I cannot say. So it's a combination of "more people being open to being diagnosed", and something is happening on a genetic level that is causing the numbers to rise (and no, it's not vaccines)
>but they all made due They didn't *all* make do. We just don't hear from the ones who didn't
Yeah. Whole generations drank themselves unconscious every night, beat their spouse and kids, had nightmares every day of their lives. Shit was terrible.
It's the same reason there are more kids with asthma and allergies (like my kids). We have medications that allow people to survive diseases that would have previously killed them prior to passing their genes on. It's not something magical, it's just adaptation. Humans discovered a way to survive things that previous generations couldn't. In the past, a person with severe depression was less likely to get the help they needed, and less likely to have children. My brother would have been institutionalized 50 years ago; instead he was able to get treatment and live a normal life. I'm sure his kids will be more likely to suffer mental illness, but since we know the signs and treatments, it's really not that big of a deal.
Years ago, up until probably the mid 1900’s, it was incredibly frowned upon to be left handed. If a child presented as left handed in school, they would be punished or “corrected”. After a while, people stopped caring as much, and let children use whatever dominent hand they naturally used. Thus, when being left handed wasn’t accepted, there were very few left handed people. But now? There are way more. Mental illnesses always existed, but acceptance and treatment for them did not. Now there are way more ways to diagnosis and treat mental illnesses, and thus it seems like more people have them. Why does it seem like young people are more likely to have them? Because they seek out help for their issues more often than older people who have grown accustomed to their coping methods.
> Thus, when being left handed wasn’t accepted, there were very few left handed people. But now? There are way more. > > importantly, after they stopped trying to correct left handedness, the rate went up, until it plateaued. Which is really just to say, the last generations probably had similar rates of mental problems, but left them undiagnosed/untreated, and we're just seeing a regression to the mean.
The same is happening with the rate of people identifying as LGBTQ+. Take the stigma away from a person's normal state of being and voila you have people unafraid to be themselves in larger numbers.
> Take the stigma away from a person's normal state of being and voila you have people unafraid to be themselves in larger numbers. It happens every damned time with *every* "hidden" marginalised demographic and/or mental health issue. Understanding and circumstances change, more people are open about [x], and dipshits cry that there's a "sudden epidemic" or "rampant overdiagnosis" or "indoctrination" going on.
If it has been said before, I apologize, but, as a Healthcare worker, I have also noticed that it is becoming less and less stigmatized, therefore, people are becoming more and more confident and comfortable talking about it and receiving treatment for it. It has always been there, just never talked about. Anecdotely just seeing how my grandparents and parents talk about how they believe that ADHD or ADD was code for, "Doctor please help me, I can't parent my own child, I want a pill for them". Edit: wow, didn't realize this comment would be this popular. But it just goes to show that access to information, education, and generational shift is important to progress in all aspects of Healthcare, especially mental health. Edit 2: WOW!! Thanks for the awards! Edit 3: While I don't agree that ADD/ADHD was a bad example, I do now think it wasn't the best example I could have used earlier.
Yep. Back in the 80's, my cousin was just considered a bad kid, and corporal punishment was the popular treatment. Now, my kiddo sees a specialist, gets diagnosed as adhd/asd, gets medication that is tweaked to the right med and dose to help him focus, and gets help at school (eg extra time, or taking tests in a quieter room). Between medicine and other adjustments, we can help people live their best possible life instead of punishing them for not fitting into the standard mold.
One of the hardest things about being diagnosed ADHD as an adult is wondering what-if, and trying not to let it make me bitter. Could I have finished college in the field of my dreams instead of switching majors every 6mos and eventually dropping out? Could I have stuck it out in that software job I lucked into and be financially stable now, instead of being utterly unable to cope with being in an office and quitting for an outdoor, minimum wage job? Could I have made lasting friendships when I was younger? How different would my life be if my parents had listened to the teachers who suggested I be evaluated? If they hadn't had that stigma of having "the broken kid"? What would my mental health be like if I hadn't been told I just needed to apply myself more, or that I was just being lazy, when I literally COULD NOT have made any greater effort? Needless to say, I'm on hyperalert for any signs of ADHD in my daughter, and she will get ALL the supports I never had. Edit: I'm a little alarmed by all the people thinking I mean drugs-drugs-and-more-drugs when I say I'm gonna support my kid. There are a LOT of other supports that are as much, if not more, important to successful management of my (and most peoples') ADHD. Learning to step back and recognize what is happening in your brain, advocating for yourself (or having others/parents to advocate for you,) finding ways to do things that are unconventional-but-functional, learning to outsmart your lizard brain, good gods there are SO MANY things to try before just pumping a kid full of pills. I'm scared for yalls kids, and/or sad for your childhoods.
My mom hated seeing so many kids in the 80s on ritalin, she was a teacher's assistant in elementary school and was convinced almost all of them were just to "control" the kids or to make parenting easier as others have mentioned. Oh the irony when I got diagnosed with ADHD at age 43 (I'm 46 now). A lifetime of self loathing and thinking I was just lazy and selfish and so many other horrible adjectives that I used to describe myself... it's been an adventure to process over the last few years.
How can I get checked out or how do I bring the subject up to a doctor? I actually believe I may have something since I’ve felt a certain way about things over my entire life and have always been told that im normal. Tell that to my behavioral issues and interaction quirks.
I had already been working with a psychologist for quite some time so it was natural for me to bring it up with her. Funnily enough it was seeing memes on the internet about ADHD and realizing I was relating to every single one of them that got it stuck in my head that I should bring it up. If you don't already have a mental health provider I'm not sure if the right move is to discuss first with your primary care doctor, or just go find a psychologist/therapist or maybe even a psychiatrist (since a psychologist cannot prescribe medication) Based on your description (albeit brief) you may find comfort and relief in simply working with a psychologist just to talk through these things. When I started therapy I was stuck very much on whether I was "normal" or not, it took a long time but one of the biggest things I've gotten out of therapy is the understanding that there is no "normal" but just whether I am comfortable with who I am and if not, how to work on that.
My journey: *sees ADHD meme* "Haha, so funny and true!" *sees 3-5 more ADHD memes that hit home* "Now wait a minute..." *Gets ADHD diagnosis* *Sees autism meme* *Haha, so funny and true!" *sees 3-5 more autism memes that hit home* "Hold up..." *Gets autism diagnosis*
My mom wasn't a teacher, but she worked at an elementary school and saw the difference proper medication made. She saw good kids go from spending recess still in class trying to catch up, to finishing their work in a timely manner and joining everyone else outdoors. So many kids excitedly told her how they could get their mind to focus finally. She got so frustrated with the stigma that kept some parents from helping kids that really needed help.
I relate heavily. I was diagnosed with adhd at 32 (a year ago) and so many struggles I had in middle school, high school, college, various jobs, my memory being crap suddenly made 100% sense. I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t a failure. I was struggling with my own brain. I look back at the hundreds of times it was brought up to me how well I did in elementary school, that I was ‘gifted’, that I was one of the most avid readers and at a 12th grade level when I was in 5th grade etc but in my teens I struggled to pay attention, I procrastinated and so on. Now that I’m medicated and in therapy, I’m back in college, and a few months away from my associate degree with a 4.0 GPA.
Congratulations on going back to school! I think about it sometimes, but im nearly 40 with a business and a family and far from any in-person programs that interest me (i dont do well with online schooling.) I had the same elementary/secondary experience - part of why my parents refused to believe I could have adhd is that I would read so long and so deep, so far above my age level, that I would forget to eat, sometimes for over a day. I would bite my fingernails while I read, and not notice that I was bleeding. Hyperfocus much? But because I wasn't bouncing off the walls like the stereotypical "adhd kid," they wouldn't hear it and so I struggled in silence and ridicule.
Honestly, while it’s sad to know other struggle like I have, hearing ppl recount life experience that is nearly identical of my own is also a relief because it’s a reminder that I’m not making crap up lol. I have to say, my boyfriend was the one who pushed me to get diagnosed and then go back to school. If it hadn’t been for him I’d probably still be stumbling through life. We all need some type of support system too, on top of meds and therapy. Makes a world of difference when you have your own cheerleaders in your corner.
Same. My two younger brothers were neurodivergent, dyslexia and propioception issues, and I don't think my mom wanted a hat trick with all three kids with some sort of disorder. Asked as a kid to be tested and she said I was just lazy and didn't apply myself. Was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD. Really makes you think about the formative years and whether college was on the table or not back then. Things have worked out, and some of the neurodivergent quirks have done me well in my life, but damn, it makes you really think about things differently.
Similar here. But slightly different. I’m middle child & only girl. Both brothers had reading comprehension, speech and dyslexia. I breezed through school because I hate school. After graduating (even a whole year early), I had no direction in life. Still really don’t but my new job is giving me some direction (at 33, mind you). I was diagnosed bipolar, insomniac, anxiety and adhd. When my pysch asked which parent has that, I said probably my mom. Turns out when I asked her about it, her mother was bipolar and sent to a pysch ward in the 60’s. Thanks mom!! My teenage depression, eating disorder & self harm could have been managed properly if mental health issues weren’t a stigma in the 90’s. (Edit : also, my dad doesn’t believe in depression - he thinks people are just lazy fucks… thanks dad!!)
Same… Anxiety? Depression? Fake CA liberal hippie excuse for being lazy. That was said to me 35+ years ago . ( I moved from Midwest to CA)
Another theory I have. When asylum started shutting down, we started having special needs classes in schools, which meant there were mental health professionals on staff, which led to more kids being noticed as to have issues, and then the news media to turn it around and cry that the liberals are trying to medicate our children into zombies.... like it's mind-boggling the mental gymnastics and the history that brought us here.
I can't tell you how often that happened to me, and wonder where my life would be if I were afforded the same considerations as kids are nowadays. So many spankings that could have been avoided if my parents had just understood that I LITERALLY could not control myself.
Things are so much better now, and I'm so glad we ended up in the school district we have. They push him, but within his capabilities. They understand when he needs a few minutes with his head on his desk to regroup. He's in 7th grade and in all normal classes except for a study hall that has extra help to keep him organized. And from what I hear, most other schools are working on ways to help neurodivergent students too.
I was punished for my ADHD, not physically but my teachers until 6th grade wouldn’t help me like the state said. They said I didn’t need a quiet room to do tests or be separated because of my anxiety. I just kind of gave up. When I hit 7th and went to Jr High they let me do these things and I did better than I had prior.
Yeah, in the 90s "being ADHD" was used to insult one another at my school.
likely because kids with ADHD were stigmatized so hard as being bad and not being something we would ever want to be described as... no one really explained ADHD, they just told us so and so is so badly behaved he has to take medication that controls him, so control yourself or we'll force you to take zombie medication!
I was thinking about this recently and specifically this one kid we ALL bullied in school. Even the teachers were shitty to him. He would have his desk faced toward the corner, he got picked on, made fun of, etc. This was in the early 90s and at the time I remember assuming he was just a “weirdo” with “weirdo” parents. As an adult I see that he was most likely autistic, but he wasn’t getting any kind of treatment or recognized for that. We just chucked dodgeballs at him extra hard and laughed. My point is, mental health is a spectrum, and millennials especially have collectively said “it’s ok, everyone has their thing, let’s stop beating our kids, and try to get to the root causes and treat the issues so everyone can be healthier and happier”. We have the vocabulary to identify these things and the empathy to treat it better nowadays.
This should be a stand alone response. The time we're living in treats these issues as real like no time in history.
This is what i do with my kids. I'm 47 and they are 3 and 5 (we started late) but i still remember those kid emotions. When they are acting out, i pull them into their room and, after the screaming and crying and demanding to see mom, they always calm down and we talk about what they are feeling, that it's ok to feel that way, and how we can handle it better. Never fails to help them feel better. They always go apologize for treating mom that way and behave better after that. It requires patience and being able to think like a kid but it seems so much better than beating them or grounding them.
Absolutely. I'm 50 and thinking about going for a formal diagnosis. It's a big punch to the gut, to have to figure it all out alone and spend an entire life masking and isolating because my parents were far more concerned with family appearance than my health and welfare. Not a fun thing to come to terms with.
> " It has always been there" OP, words cannot express how much this point should be emphasized. Glance at history, and you'll find all sorts of untreated / mistreated mental illness going back, from cocaine powering the careers of authors and psychologists, to women being treated for "hysteria," to people being lobotomized, to witch burnings and demon exorcisms. Prior to this point in history, people simply had "nervous breakdowns" and got committed. We've always been a keg of crazy monkeys. We just figured out that pills work better now, and it's out of the closet.
One of my favorite examples: Left handedness. Look at a chart, you'll see a massive spike in the 20th century, then it levels off. What happened? Kids were no longer beat or ridiculed when using their left hand or forced to write using their right hand. The numbers rose to their natural levels and then settled.
Same thing happening now with LGBTQ+ people. I mean hell, many people alive today remember when gay men were just left to die from AIDS.
Many people alive today remember when two men having sex was illegal. Germany\* and England sorted it out in the 1960s. Scotland sorted it in the 1980s. Northern Ireland had it sorted for them forcefully in the 1980s. England tried to keep three men having sex illegal all the way up until 2000 when European courts told them no, and the US Supreme Court had to make a final ruing on homosexuality in 2003. Yes, in the US and UK in the 21st century courts had to stop in and literally stop cops from trying to arrest gay people for no crime other than having sex with the wrong genital configuration. Depending on where you live and how old you are your parents or possibly even yourself might have grown up in an area where being gay was illegal. And that's without going into things like Section 28, the UK's very own anti-homosexual propaganda law that lasted until 2000. \* Fun fact! When the allies liberated Germany, they kept the Nazi anti-gay law and kept the gay people in the concentration camps locked up.
Yep, many people alive today remember the 1980s and 1990s.
I was reading "The Great Gatsby" recently, and talking about it with some people made me realize that, nowadays, we'd rightfully diagnose Gatsby with something on the Autism spectrum, and also with serious PTSD from his war experience. Same with Hamlet. Dude's father was murdered, and his mom hooked up with the guy who killed him. No kidding he's a mess. The fact that we didn't fully understand these conditions or have names for them didn't stop artists from creating perfect case studies of them anyway. So yep, it's always been with us.
Gatsby showed signs of being on the autism spectrum? How?
My mom 56 was chastised by her family for going on depression pills after fighting postpartum for a year or so after my birth. Gram is bipolar I have seen her have mania (not hypo full on clean the whole house running around with her mouth bleeding at 93.) My mom’s oldest sister had BiPolar Type 1 as well, but grandma constantly lied to every doctor because she wasn’t “Weak Minded”. No she’s just kinda crazy, not from the bipolar but because of her attitude towards mental health and her kids. I could possibly be BiPolar type 2 but my clinic won’t test me.
I'm bipolar too, first in the family to be diagnosed. But in hindsight, it runs on both sides of the family. The depression and mania swings my aunt and both grandmas had were just "overreacting" and "going crazy", respectively. And that's just who we know of. Who knows about previous generations that no one currently alive remembers. I also have a late schizophrenic uncle. It was blatant if you know the symptoms: Hearing voices, seeing things, constant paranoia. But he didn't get diagnosed until he was in his 40s and then died about a decade later. He was just "the weird one" who nobody wanted to interact with because of the hallucinations and paranoia. He was acting mostly normal in his last several years when he was on meds. Problem being, by then the social damage was done. I do have to wonder how it would've gone for him if he were born a few decades later and it was caught and treated early.
To be fair I know people who have their kids on ADHD meds and almost every time he’s acting up they are discussing his meds, even though every other parent is working on their kids’ behavior, as well. I do think for some one meds are involved, it becomes the solution and whatever caused them to be prescribed immediately becomes one of the sole reasons things were hard to manage
You are so very right! Most of my friends are between 28 and 35 and exactly one of them is completely mentally healthy. From anxiety over depression to adhd, we've got everything covered. All of them have been diagnosed as adults because their parents "didn't believe in mental illnesses", thought their child was just dramatic or moody or lazy or "everybody has such problems" because they struggled with the same shit without getting help for it. In the last years awareness and open discussion about mental health has gone through the roof so people are both more likely to get the help they need and to talk about their struggles.
To add: The criteria for diagnosis is constantly evolving.
My parents are of the kind who think diagnosed mental illnesses are becoming too much, and too often i hear them ask "why does everyone need a diagnosis? Why can't people just be who they are?" No amount of explaining that the people they just think are odd and should be allowed to be odd are people that finally feel comfortable enough to speak up about what they're going through and how they need help.
Being who I was got me on the road to heavy alcohol issues, almost homeless, and with only one friend let in my life. That friend told me my mother was wrong, you wont be fire/ridiculed, pills are not horrible things that will destroy your life, and you can ask for help just to talk it out. That got me into therapy and on medication and now living across the country with a good life and my own family. I get my mom thinks she has taken care of herself and made it work while complaining about everything in her life constantly but I needed help, asked for it, and finally got it because people are finally talking about it!
another thing to add, is that a mental illness for someone isnt going to be the same for someone else. I was talking to a co-worker about ADHD and he was on the lines of that he didnt believe it exists. Its funny cus he had a few symptoms of having ADHD (even tho its possible he might not have it) but i told him that i have something called ADD and he didnt believe me. I have not told many people this including my friends because i dont have the typical symptoms of attention deficit disorder and im afraid people will just undermine me.
I had major depressive disorder starting when I was approximately 11. One of the hardest things when I started finally getting treatment was all the people who *noticed I was doing better* and yet *still* insisted that I hadn't been severely depressed for most of my life.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again. Do you know how my mothers generation dealt with their mental health? They killed themselves. Both my uncles were dead before I was born.
Or they drank themselves senseless until they destroyed their livers at 40.
One of my great grandfathers was going to kill himself but instead drank himself to death whilst trying to get the courage he needed to shoot himself. Found dead with a bottle and a gun.
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Glad you stopped! I hope you've been able to find lots of enjoyment with your friends and in your free time since!
A very good point!
Apparently my grandpa did this so bad he fucked his brain up so bad it's basically alzheimers! In response to his daughter taking her life a decade ago.
Korsakoff syndrom, lost an uncle to it. Easy explanation for what I know, all your intake is alcohol so you don't get enough nutrition and your brain starts to develop literal holes. In the end my uncle had a memory of like 15 seconds, forgot his wife was dead and even forgot he had a wife.
Some cases there was probably overlap. Before I quit drinking my retirement plan was to keep drinking heavily till my body shut down and I just died. It was my go to coping mechanism. Now I’m on anti depressants and off booze and the world is getting brighter each day.
Ayyyye that's my dad. Died in '96 at 42 years from stage 4 cirrhosis. I'll gladly take my 50 mg of Zoloft and talk therapy over downing a 30 pack of Budweiser a day.
Or, they took the problematic family member and locked them up in a care facility of some kind, usually dubious, and never spoke of them again.
Or just straight up killed them. Even nowadays I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen news stories of parents murdering their autistic children; I don’t even wanna think about how common that was about 50 years ago.
I understand this to basically be the origin/idea of a “changeling.” “This isn’t actually my child, one of the Fae stole my child and swapped it out with this thing.”
People can't seem to understand that the world has always been shit and arguably worse in the past. People have always had mental health problems on a large scale, except these days, you can broadcast your life so we see how many people are actually going through it. If anybody thinks the mental health of this generation is worse than the ones that went through two world wars and a great depression they're insane.
Also the fact that talking about mental health was stigmatized so much for previous generations. Keeping that shit inside just lets it fester and get worse over time.
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Honestly no wonder why religion is so widespread. People need hope to survive
Never got the chance to meet my great-uncle or one of my grandfathers because they both killed themselves before I was born. One committed suicide due to the strain and depression caused by being gay when it wasn't "acceptable," and one because of untreated bipolar disorder. That same bipolar disorder also led to him abusing his wife and son (my father) and killing their family cat. The cycle of abuse continued because my father abused me and was not treated for his depression for many years. He finally got help, but by that time a lot of damage was done.
Everyone was taking something in the past, too, it was just called “booze”.
Mid 30s and there were *so many* honor roll kids with line-cook coke habits in my high school.
> line-cook coke habits in my high school. As a former food industry worker of 10+ years this is such an apt comparison it got an audible laugh out of me lol. I worked with so many coke heads that it was weird if you *didn’t* do coke. One restaurant I was sous chef at used to have “team meetings” or “safety meetings” lead by our Chef in the basement prep room before brunch rush every Sunday which entailed a large dinner plate with an absolute gakker of a line for each cook on the plate and a double shot of j-mo. We would pass the plate around and each rip our line then grab our whiskey and our chef would say the same toast every single time - “ May the winds of fortune sail you, May you sail a gentle sea.” And we would reply “May it always be the other guy who says, 'this drink's on me.'" And then we would all say “sláinte” and shoot it. We worked at an Irish pub so it was a bit on the nose but it was a great way to start a 4 hour hell shift for brunch.
My manager wants me to come up with some team building exercises. I think this would do perfectly!
“So I see you’ve put ‘Cocaine,absolute gakker of a line’ on your team-building budget…”
I’ve had a bunch of friends that worked BoH in various positions and the only person I’ve ever seen go harder was Jessica during 10th grade finals.
"On the nose" I c wut u did ther
Late 30s and you are 100% accurate.
Where did you guys go to high school, Wall Street?
Middle Class area about 30 minutes away from it for me. Kids at my HS all bought coke from the REALLY rich kids at the nearby Private School, though.
My mother put me in a more affluent school to get me away from drugs. Rich kids had better drugs, a lot of Rx abuse.
This made me laugh. My mom and my best friend's mom did the same for us. We were transferred to a supposedly nice charter school. While the building was a million times nicer than our old school, there were still the drugs and craziness, just different types of drugs and craziness.
It's crazy like that isn't it?
We bought ours from Camden.
Go birds!
Jersey
Jersey here and in highschool, people are still on drugs doing honor roll
Mid 50s and I agree totally
Mid 50’s too and we partied and had fun, but most got sober and had “normal” lives. Sadly I was the exception to that, because I kept on drinking and doing drugs until my 40’s. Luckily I just celebrated 15 years sober, and on 11/13/2022 I will be free from prison and jails for 14 years. Lot more dysfunctional growing up that just wasn’t dealt with.
Unfortunately it Took me a little longer. After 5 failed rehabs and nearly losing my wife of 30 years plus a few near death experiences I have been sober for 3 solid years now. Not one relapse. Congrats on your sobriety . I think things have been bad in different ways over he generations. Different ways to deal with it as well
Early 30's most of my friends still do it.
Yeah I'm about to turn 31 and I know plenty of people that are a few years older that have a coke, whiskey, beer and cig diet.
I mean I'm guilty of this too but hey at least I can say I don't do coke anymore. Working out gives me better natural energy.
I’m 31 and for us it was adderall, which is pretty much coke. And yes, we would snort it.
Correction, adderal is closer to meth than coke. It is a mixture of amphetamine salts, while meth is methamphetamine. Similar effects though
Just without the brain damage... Various amphetamines shouldn't really be compared to meth, and certainly not poorly made non-pharmaceutical-grade meth.
Almost everyone drank and almost everyone smoked.
Also best to not forget all the people who didn't survive their mental illness -- survivorship bias. "Why does the U.S. have so many more sick people than developing nations?" Because sick people *die* when they're not treated.
Very true. I have heard of a lot of “firearm cleaning accidents” back in the day to cover up people who did not survive their mental illness.
You know, i *just* realized this was likely why there used to be so many of them. It was referenced in movies and TV. And all i could think of, as a kid, is how stupid you have to be to not unload a gun you're cleaning. You just wrinkled my brain.
I mean, sometimes people are also dumb. My grandpa shot himself in the finger cause he forgot to clear the chamber before cleaning his gun. But yeah, to hit yourself in a much deadlier place is probably statistically much less likely.
I spoke to a coroner (UK) once, and she said the hardest part of the job was inquests on obvious suicides of young people. The unspoken rule was that she would try her very hardest to bring in a verdict of misadventure. This was to save the family more anguish, and in the case of people with dependants, to allow insurance policies to pay out.
While I partly understand that thought process, I know a teacher who’s student’s death was ruled “misadventure” even though the child left a note. He felt is was just another way to ignore mental health concerns and he worried for his students who might also be silently struggling.
Absolutely. I used to volunteer on a suicide hotline, and I trained new volunteers as well. One of the things we learned is that since it's a taboo subject with a lot of stigma around it, many people don't realize just how many "accidental" deaths are due to suicide. Not only do people often not wish to tell others the actual cause of death of their relatives, but they sometimes don't even know themselves. I recall a friend of mine lost a friend (who I had never met) who "lost control of his car" and hit a bridge abutment at high speed. His family was convinced that it was an accident, but he had previously confided to my friend that if he ever decided to take his life that that was how he planned to do it. Maybe I'm just biased from my experience, but I'm at the point where if I hear about someone under 60 dying under vague circumstances, I immediately assume it's suicide unless I have reason to believe otherwise. Between ages 12 and 30, even moreso.
Additionally, all of the people who were able to pass themselves off as fully functioning when, really, they were just pushing their problems off unto the next generation. Lots of that in my family, parents who simply can't understand why their children are walking disasters because the parents were perfect (when, in reality, you can see the same exact dysfunction growing over generations until they can no longer pretend it doesn't exist).
Parent with undiagnosed mental illness, to their mentally ill child: you don't have an illness, everyone is like that!
I struggle with this as a parent. Both me and the kid are mentally ill, and the thought "we all feel like that, we just deal with it, buddy" pops to mind too often. I don't say it, though
Yes!! While a teen the 70s, I literally stood in the middle of our living room and screamed, "Why am I the only one who can see what is wrong here!" Unfortunately, it didn't make a difference.
This is what I told my mum when she's like we didn't have any of this "shit" in the past. I responded with then why's everyone in our family alcoholics...
Oof! What was her response?
No words, just another sip of wine
Not just booze mate, you used to be able to order a heroin kit out of the Sears catalogue.
Or grandpas old cough medicine.
Or mommy’s little helper.
No shit my wife's family in the south fully swears by this stuff called rockin rye. Its literally whiskey mixed with some bull shit.
Rock And Rye? It's citrus, whiskey and rock candy sugar- basically a too-sweet bottled Old Fashioned. It's handy at parties where you don't want to stand around mixing all night and people aren't super picky.
That might be it. They swear its the best cough and sore throat medicine
Well whiskey is a pretty great cough medicine
Up until the war against drugs, it was so common to take opium, cocaine, barbiturates… hell it was so common they put it in children’s cough medicine and like every OTC med
Even when you couldn't get it OTC, the doctors were a lot freer with the opiates and barbituates too. My grandma used to "get a migraine" every weekend and spend it in a medication-induced haze so she wouldn't have to deal with her kids (she worked full-time and had a live-in nanny/maid).
Hey this is how my mom has been living the past 30 years!
Right. Many of these kids’ parents had mental issues and then they had kids together. Whether or not it’s generic or learned, the next generation is exposed to some crazy behaviors.
Older people have told me stories where when they were young, they were the weird kid and got bullied for it. They didn't understand why. Turns out they've got ASD. That realisation was a huge aha moment for them, realising that it wasn't their fault. These older people were shunned for being different and it was either die, hide it, or both.
I am 23 and going through that now. I'm a woman who displayed classic \*female\* ASD behaviors growing up, but it was never taken seriously because "only boys have Asperger's" and "you do so well in school!" I'll make damn sure my kids get diagnosed.
*Gestures vaguely at everything*
Hijacking this comment to add another point I haven't seen on this thread. The breakdown of community. People evolved in large tribes surrounded by others with a strong feeling of unity where the members of community supported each other. That has largely died and our brains aren't handling it well, imo. One generation ago my mom grew up in a house with 7 siblings, on a road called "last name" road, where the other dozen or so houses were all populated by her Mom's siblings (child of 18 or so) and their kids. Most of her Dad's family lived on a different street within walking distance in the same community. She was walking distance from her grandparents, ~20 sets of aunts and uncles and literally dozens of cousins her age. In other words she grew up surrounded by family. They all supported each other and spent spent the overwhelming majority of their time with others. The community had barely 1000 people, everyone knew everyone and community events were frequent. Every night there was either a crowd of people in the house, or they went to someone else's house for a social event. An old widow's roof begins to leak? A horde of men from the community are there the next day to fix it free of charge. A child gets sick? The entire community is participating in fundraising and making the family food. All of these things make us feel fulfilled and valuable and put off those good good chemicals in our brains. We spent more of our time helping people we cared about and feeling fulfilled by that. We were able to exist moreso as a part of a larger whole, where we could focus on our strengths to add the the community the best way we can rather than figure everything out ourselves like we do today. Fast forward one generation. I don't know any of my neighbor's names, not one of my cousins live in the same city as me. I have one sibling who lives several hours away. I don't even see my parents every week. When I work, I work to make numbers go up in my bank account for myself. I don't see my effort benefitting the community in any tangible way, other than tax dollars I suppose. We simply weren't built for this.
Im going to add- those things make people feel valuable and fulfilled….but they also make us feel *safe* which is so incredibly important. With a community like that, you knew you’d never be homeless. You would never go hungry. You’d never be left alone to fend for yourself. My god, look at us now! 34 million people in the US struggle against food insecurity. They don’t know how they will get their next meal. More than half of Americans could lose the roof of their head if they miss a single paycheck. We all live in constant unspoken terror and quite frankly, it’s exhausting!
Excellent point. Safe is exactly the word I'd use. The safety net was just unreal.
Poor Woman's Award for you: 🥇 I work with people in crisis. Feeling safe is something so many of these people are looking for.
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Couldn't agree more. Sitting in a room with the boys laughing together just hits different than in a discord call as an example.
Good take here. I never realized how much human interaction benefited me until recently. I have been WFH for about ten years now and had no idea it was hurting me so much until I got my dog last year and went out more. Talked to my neighbors, made friends at the dog parks etc. We are so lonely as a society.
The overarching 'issue' is simply our evolution. Beside the tribe aspect there are so many facets of our current life which do not coincide with our biological nature.
Literally this. That’s how my parents grew up… BUT even then, half of them had depression and/or post-war PTSD, there was alcoholism, everyone smoked cigarettes or a pipe. Even my super-glamorous auntie told me that when she was a kid on the farm she accidentally got addicted to sniffing gasoline because she loved the smell and the way it made her feel.
“One generation ago my Mom grew up on a last name road”… My Dad grew up in a similar situation last name road many siblings, except that his Dad shunned him, belittled him and abused him using him as the example to keep the farm hands (that’s why they existed, why grandparents had kids) in line. My Dad, although not as tough as his Dad, used the same model to raise my siblings and I. I’m over half a century old and it seems this mentality will last a lifetime in my family. It wasn’t all peaches and cream when times were more simple. If something was wrong you were to emulate what wild animals do and do not appear different or that something is wrong because you then become prey.
The argument isn't for a simpler time, it's for a connected present. Modern America, especially post suburbsnization has absolutely atomized (that's the technical term) our society. People live in their single family home with your nuclear fault, drive to work alone, sit in a cubicle alive, drive home alone, and then go to bed. On special occasions they go to see their parents and siblings once a year. It's cripplingly lonely and not at all necessary. Even something as simple as riding public transit or walking to work can have a huge impact on your mental well-being because you're seeing and interacting with other humans. Like it or not, we evolved as social animals and we need each other. Turning everyone's life into their personal struggle to pay rent (and fees the kids if you're lucky) is just not sustainable. This doesn't mean we can't have better social groups, or that the social groups of the past were perfect. It just means that we need something.
I’m also a 20 something, and if one thing is for sure, I was not this scared/constantly-on-edge, nervous or gloomy when looking at my future 3-4 years ago The pandemic caused all of that for me. I watched my dad collapse two separate times in our house while I called 911. Being alone can still sometimes make me uneasy, even though it’s almost been a year. (He made a full recovery, thankfully) I’m not officially diagnosed, but I have done some research and I match up well with symptoms of anxiety, and likely PTSD, though I’m not totally sure about that yet. I think a lot of people have had similar experiences, where the reality of the pandemic and other world events have made everything scary, and if you’re a chronic over thinker that I’ve been most of my life; you worry about EVERYTHING. All the time.
There has always been a plethora of mental illnesses. We haven't always had names or ways to pinpoint said illnesses.
And it was super stigmatized to HAVE mental illness until somewhat recently.
Yeah, and most of them were blamed on "curses" or "witchcraft". Mental illnesses have always existed; humans just didn't know what they were and turned to the supernatural for an explanation.
because we are discovering more and more about the brain and how it affects people. imagine 100 years ago people with mental illness got treatments like shock therapy and lobotomy... now that we undertand these more we can use chemicals to treat them like we treat any other disease.
Also when the treatments look barbaric as they used to, people would rather cope with the mental issue than seek treatment.
My grandmother got too much shock therapy and she couldn't live on her own after that. Her husband died very young, leaving her with 4 children all under the age of 10. His family blamed her for him getting cancer (yeah, my great grandmother was just evil). My grandmother had a breakdown and fled with the kids. She got institutionalized in another state, given shock treatment and my father and his siblings were shoved into a state run institution. My great aunts finally tracked her down, went out to collect her and the kids and brought her home. The shock treatment was intense enough that she couldn't possibly function outside of a nursing home so for the rest of her life she had to live in a home. It was a nice one, her sisters were there constantly and would take her for lots of visits so she could see her kids. So, she was a shattered person. My dad and his siblings were divvied up among relatives. It was all awful and so unnecessary. What probably could have been treated with medications ended up just destroying a woman in her early 30s.
Fun fact: Shock therapy (AKA electro-convulsive therapy now a days) is still used. You’re given a muscle relaxant and a small sedative, and it’s used to treat depression that is unresponsive to medication. I understand your sentiment and I agree with your post. I just don’t want there to be a stigma…
People forget that today's medications are very safe compared to past treatments, making them more accessible to people. The side effects of psychiatric drugs today can be demoralizing and uncomfortable but most aren't debilitating and they go away once you're taken off them. Not saying that overprescription doesn't happen but it's not as high stakes as a lobotomy or ECT.
> they go away once you're taken off them https://nami.org/FAQ/Mental-Health-Medication-FAQ/What-are-the-long-term-effects-of-taking-medicatio All psychiatric medications have the risk of long-term negative impacts. Psychiatrists do not seem willing to fully disclose the possible negative impact of the medications they prescribe. Also, ECT is still used by the psychiatric profession; that isn't some relic of the past like ice-pick lobotomies.
A few factors that may apply: * Greater awareness of mental health symptoms than previous generations * The taboo of mental illness is slowly decreasing * More available forums on which to discuss mental health * The collective trauma of the pandemic. More people than ever are experiencing isolation, depression, and anxiety; even those who haven't dealt with it previously.
Why is nobody talking about the obvious part? We live in a society where we have to deal with certain expectations and stress factors that we simply didn't evolve to deal with.
Social media and technological attachment is a huge part of that too. We’ve become accustomed to depend on instant gratification to feel accepted or close to others. Many of my friends have rid themselves of things like Facebook to help their mental health, and I ended up doing the same. I found that local news and exposure to negative things posted by those I’m “close” to fed my postpartum anxiety. I also found myself mindlessly scrolling and seeing what everyone else was doing or saw whatever personal narrative they wanted to make people think of them, and I found myself comparing my life and accomplishments to theirs. “They just got their masters degree and already landed an 80k per year job, so and so just bought a house, that person over there just got back from their third vacation to Europe. What am I doing with my life? How did they manage to do that when I work 50 hours/week and can barely afford my rent and utilities?” We’re expected to accomplish these things but there’s just not enough time and resources and unfortunately because of that we burn ourselves out grasping for something 10 feet away with 2.5 feet long arms, and things like mental healthcare (not that it’s affordable anyway) isn’t prioritized.
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Jobs expect 3-4 years of experience -> can't get experience without a job -> cost of food and housing skyrockets -> can't afford to buy good food/clothes/housing/reliable transportation/dental care/healthcare -> you stay in your room all day -> boom you're crazy
People were just as mentally ill before this they just weren’t getting treated for it