Coddled, Confused, and Crumbling: The Modern Youth Crisis

A college athletic coach recently told me that most of the approximately fifty young athletes he works with are seeing therapists for depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

That’s consistent with statistics on teens and young adults collected from various sources, which find that the mental health of young people in the US has deteriorated by a factor of 10 since the 1960s. That eliminates genetic explanations, by the way, which pretty much trashes the lie that the solution is psychiatric medication.

My friend and talk-show host Dennis Prager believes the problem reflects a lack of existential meaning. Plainly speaking, America’s young have no realistic understanding of life and therefore no realistic understanding of how to navigate it, much less how they fit into the overall scheme of things.

Since Dennis is smarter than moi, let’s go with that. The question then becomes, why?