At RWN, we love jokes.
Typically, when I shout “we’ve got a country to save!” it’s out the window with a smile as I drive by a guy in a suit on the side of the road calling AAA to change the tire on his Prius.
But this is not one of those jokes.
47% of college students are self-reporting as depressed in 2022. That’s up from 23% in the year 2007 (Source: University of Michigan School of Public Health).
On mental health, Professor Scott Galloway noted in a 2021 article:
“Between 2007 and 2017, suicidal ideation among college students nearly doubled. Today, roughly 1 in 10 college students report that they’ve attempted suicide. Black college students are almost twice as likely to attempt suicide as their white peers. Trans students are three times as likely to do so as their cisgender peers.”
Now, here’s the part where I’m supposed to offer a reason why the mental health of our nation’s young adults are becoming more depressed and more suicidal.
But I can’t do that.
The truth is too complicated for me to try to and pinpoint in a newsletter and is best left for professionals to try and explain.
But I will offer this: have our social and cultural norms in the last few decades really led people in their 20’s and 30’s to a happier life?
The prevailing progressive ideology often focuses on the individual’s right to choose his or her own identity and to map their lives around their reality. Any individual is more free to choose their “truth” than at any other point in human history.
Compare that with a more traditional viewpoint where men and women are different, where hard work is the badge of honor (not victimhood), where right and wrong traces back to morality informed by a higher being.
Now, which of those ideologies do you think would lead us out of the mental health crises we’re in?
Here’s to hoping we do better,
Taylor