Is There Really More Mental Illness Nowadays? Part 1: The Tracking from the Past
I often hear those of older generations expressing confusion about the apparent increase of mental illness these days; it seems like every college student and teenager is on psychotropic meds.
So, is there actually more anxiety and depression? The short answer is YES, at least according to observable data of conditions as defined by the DSM. But the question is more complicated than that. When taking other factors into account, there are some ways that mental illness prevalence has not changed much, or that changes make sense in context. I’ll start with a common mental illness transmission course through three generations:
-Imagine a set of parents raised through the Great Depression and WWII. Due to scarcity of resources, threat of war, and competition in society, they dissociate from much of the pain and emotion they feel, and develop scarcity anxiety. This makes them frugal, quick to anger, intolerant of emotion, and anxious about making mistakes (which literally spell disaster in war or economic crisis).
-These parents raise Baby Boomers in the 50s and 60s. They hold them to strict rules and expectations, enforced by corporal punishment. If the kids have strong emotions, the parents give them “something to cry about.” The kids adapt by keeping the rules and walking on eggshells to feel safe. They sit down, shut up, look pretty, and act perfect and productive. They internalize stress, often leading to physical health conditions.
Or, they come to feel that keeping the rules doesn’t help them feel any safer. They detach from the parents, leave home, and join the counterculture of the 60s-70s. They don’t just validate their own feelings, they swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and identify as their feelings, and act on them indiscriminately. They externalize their stress, blaming “the system” and generate unproductive conflicts.
Both of these states are from the transmission of “mental illness” from the parents. The first group of Boomers mentioned (productive, conservative, non-emotional) would have played a significant role in the cultural concept of mental illness and first forms of treatment. DSM 2 (1968) and DSM 3 (1980) gave us our classic definitions of anxiety and depression, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (the logical approach) developed along with these concepts. You can probably tell, the conservative-generated definitions of mental illness qualified a lot of people on the liberal end of the spectrum for a diagnosis. This stigmatized “overt mental illness” while obscuring the damaging effects of “covert mental illness.” (See post on “Covert Depression” for more on this)
-Of course, both profiles transmit mental illness to younger generations. The conservative Boomers (dissociated from emotion, judgmental, perfectionistic) parent much like their parents, but perhaps with less physical violence since research has shown it to be clearly harmful. They have trouble validating emotions, seek solutions before understanding (FIXERS) and still use verbal violence. This kind of parenting keeps a child in emotional limbo: they have emotions that aren’t physically punished (which quickly induces dissociation), but also can’t be processed with a safe person. This can lead to mental illness symptoms easily diagnosable by the DSM, such as classic anxiety or depression.
On the other side, Flower Power parents may have no boundaries. Their kids often feel neglected and unsafe without guidance. They suffer the traumas of their own impulsive, emotion-driven behavior. They often impose their own rules and boundaries on themselves as they anxiously seek to self-parent. Again, these symptoms are easily diagnosable.
So, the point of tracking this transmission is recognizing that, even if they didn’t call it “clinical mental illness” back then, it still got transmitted to the present. The adaptations are different, but they are still adaptations to real circumstances. And adaptations are not inherently better or worse than others, they just match the context. For example:
-a child in the 50s might have walked to school uphill in the snow both ways because their father might have beaten them if they didn’t, leading to dissociation and restriction of the emotional spectrum. When they grow up, they can’t empathize with someone who succumbs to the urge to stay in bed when depressed.
-a child in the 90s might play hooky when feeling stressed, either because the parent didn’t care, or it would just lead to an argument (rather than a beating). This child might retain a fuller emotional spectrum, but not know how to deal with the emotions, manifesting as an anxiety disorder.
-a child in 2022 may adapt to stress by staying in bed because there are no dire consequences for not going (GEDs are easy to come by, welfare is more liberal), most people still haven’t figured out how to talk about feelings effectively, and most kids have a limitless supply of electronic dopamine hits that makes it easy to distract themselves from hard emotions. It’s not that these kids are inherently less resilient, they just haven’t needed the numb callousness of previous generations, and have been taught to medicate, rather than treat, their emotional injuries.
So, when trying to determine whether there is actually more mental illness now, we must consider that many people in the past might not have marked “Yes” in a survey using the definition of mental illness that we use today, but that much of today’s illnesses are influenced by different adaptations to stress of earlier generations.
See Part 2
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