According to the 2016–17 Healthy Minds Study, an annual survey of mental health on American college campuses, while 44% of students said that they were flourishing, 39% reported experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety.
The proportion of students experiencing suicidal ideation has grown from 6% in 2007 to 11% in 2017. The percentage of students receiving psychotherapy has jumped from 13% to 24% over the same period.
Even though more students are getting help, only a little more than half of those with symptoms of depression and anxiety had received treatment in the previous year.
This story by Sylvia Mathews Burwell in Foreign Affairs, seems to me to have the wrong end of the stick. The snowflakes streaming into the shrinks' offices have, in some case, literally been driven mad by the "intellectual" atmosphere they're been marinating in for years.
Further, she accepts with credulity the value of "mental health professionals," most of whom never met someone who was not also, in their eyes, a prospective "patient." When you have a degree in psychiatry or psychology, everybody looks like a nut to you.
The real solution. of course, is forcing children to confront the fact that life isn't fair, that bad things happen to good people, and that bumps, bruises and broken bones aren't all bad if the trade-off was worth it.
Today's students are suffering from a problem inherent in liberalism: that when the gap between what ought to be and what actually is becomes unbridgeable, something's got to give.
