AND THEY HAVEN'T SEEN ONE DAY OF MILITARY SERVICE – AT 10:52 A.M. ET:  Our dear college students, put upon and abused by a cruel society, are rushing to mental-health systems.  Oh their agony.  Oh their pain.  From The Wall Street Journal: 

On a recent Thursday afternoon at Ohio State University, about 30 students sit in a classroom listening to instructor Kipp Pietrantonio lecture. “Imagine you were just handed your physics test, what would happen?” he asks.

“You sweat,” calls out one student.

“Your heart starts racing,” says a young woman.

“You get jittery,” answers another.

It is a meeting of the twice weekly “Beating Anxiety” workshop” and Dr. Pietrantonio is a clinical psychologist who works at the university’s counseling center. The workshop advises students to tackle anxiety by exercising, getting enough sleep and reframing catastrophic thoughts (if my friend doesn’t text me back right away, she hates me) in more logical ways (maybe she’s studying) among other strategies.

It is one part of Ohio State’s effort to cope with the dramatic increase in the number of its 59,000 students on the Columbus campus seeking help for mental-health issues.

Ohio State has seen a 43% jump in the past five years in the number of students being treated at the university’s counseling center. At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the increase has been about 12% each year over the past decade. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, demand for counseling-center services has increased by 36% in the last seven years.

Nationwide, 17% of college students were diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the past year, and 13.9% were diagnosed with or treated for depression, according to a spring 2016 survey of 95,761 students by the American College Health Association. That is up from 11.6% for anxiety and 10.7% for depression in the spring 2011 survey. Counseling centers say they are also seeing more serious illnesses, including an uptick in the number of students coming to college with long psychiatric histories.

COMMENT:  I don't mean to minimize serious mental illness, and I favor swift and effective intervention.  But the sheer numbers suggest something very wrong in this society, in our parenting, in our attitudes toward children, even in our definition of mental health. 

Young people today have problems, but they don't begin to compare with the problems faced by the Depression and World War II generation.  A perceptive actress friend of mine points out that today's kids have rarely seen actual strife.  Many are indeed soft, "snowflakes" as they're called.

I think we'll be seeing more discussion on the mental condition of our young.  Many employers report that kids believe the world owes them a living.  No, it's what they owe the world that counts.  Giving a youngster a real challenge is often the most liberating experience, and the one that builds morale.  Maybe we've forgotten that.

October 11, 2016