America has betrayed its young

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they more than doubled.

The journalist proposes multiple explanations: social media, naturally; too little sleep; insufficient social interaction; an earlier onset of puberty. He also blames ‘the pandemic’ for making the situation even worse, though what he should really blame is not a disease that affects young people very little, but lengthy, destructive, epidemiologically ineffectual school closures and lockdowns that affected young people a great deal.

Personally, I’d add further contributing factors. Social media, sure, but more generally a disembodying dependency on the internet that detaches users from not only corporeal people but physical reality itself, which could function as a textbook definition of insanity. (One adolescent subject in the NYT’s piece, ‘M’, is ‘in love’ with an anime character named charmingly ‘Genocide Jack’. Yes, romantically in love.) An unhealthy cultural obsession with race and collective guilt (American suicide rates are higher among whites) and pervasive civilisational self-denigration. The contemporary myth that self-knowledge requires seizing on a bespoke sexual or ‘gender’ identity. Accelerating confusion over what it means to be male or female.

For example, out of the blue at 13, M demanded to be referred to as ‘they’.