Anxiety, There But For God's Grace

Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety? - The New York Times:

A very long article that reinforces the fairly well known fact that anxiety is an epidemic in the US.

In 1985, the Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A. began asking incoming college freshmen if they “felt overwhelmed by all I had to do” during the previous year. In 1985, 18 percent said they did. By 2010, that number had increased to 29 percent. Last year, it surged to 41 percent.

Why? Well the article covers cell phones, social media and helicopter parents with "maybe". Religion, broken homes, lack of institutions like "Boy" Scouts and such is not touched on -- no chance at all that embedding youth in organizations that have been used for thousands of years as frameworks for the maturing process, MIGHT have had a good effect, and tearing them all down may have had a bad one.

Nah, you "can't turn the clock back".

The pinnacle of meaningful prose in the article is this:

“The million-dollar question of raising an anxious child is: When is pushing her going to help because she has to face her fears, and when is it going to make the situation worse and she’s going to have a panic attack?” Allison told me. “I feel like I made the wrong decision many times, and it destroyed my confidence as a mother.”

As anyone who works with people with mental / emotional issues will tell you, there are basically two kinds of people that have problems ... those who are too tight, and those who are too loose. "Counselling, psychotherapy, etc are often about "tightening or loosening".

Typical comments are like "I must do X, I should do y, I can't do z" ... this person likely needs some loosening, too judgemental.

Or you might hear, "I don't really care", "I just don't know what I want to do", "nothing really matters". "it's all just a meaningless game ..." ... such a person probably needs some tightening.

I was an anxious kid, and to some degree still am an anxious adult. If I were growing up today with the level of anxiety that I had, I'd likely have been in all sorts of special care and probably still be up in Barron talking about all the things that I "couldn't do" ... if I was alive at all.

Instead, I felt like I had "no choice", but to fight through a ton of things, often with high discomfort. If I hadn't been raised with the fear of God and Hell, suicide in my early 20's was a distinct possibility -- fear of Hell, and the knowledge of how wrong and selfish relative to my family it was to "give up" stayed my hand.

So, society declared god to be "dead", hell as froze over, and if you are anxious, you get a lot of special treatment -- and shockingly, both anxiety and suicide are breaking all records.

And nobody can figure out why.

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