A column by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times this month, “‘It’s ‘Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children,” says, “Americans are now dying younger ... than China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.” Here the columnist is talking about the physical deaths of children in America.

What about their “mental-spiritual” deaths? If our children go to their graves younger physically, how are they dying mentally and spiritually?

The New York Times on April 24, giving clue to the plight of our nation’s children, had a front page article about American teenagers, declaring “It’s Life or Death: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens.” U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) research finds that close to 10 million American teens, suffering from anxiety and depression, “seriously consider(ed) suicide over the past year.” Rachel Snyder writes that “I can understand (the teens) feeling that the world has nothing to offer you.” Another New York Times front-pager last year describes a teen girl, “anxious and depressed,” who “was prescribed 10 psychiatric drugs. She’s not alone,” and calls the over-medicating of America a “medication cascade.”

Most amazingly, the two generations in America — parents and their teenage kids — are competing as to who is more “depressed,” or feeling more “suicidal” as the embodiment of the most representative psychological state of mind in their nation. Although the parents’ suicide rates are still ahead, the teens are catching up in what the Week magazine on April 15 called “an epidemic of hopelessness.”

Two successive generations in America are competing to be more successful with suicide. The culprit: Loneliness for the older generation and social isolation for the teens, in which adult loneliness and teen isolation are two sides of the same coin. “Between 2009 and 2021,” according to the CDC research, “teens who reported ‘persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness’ rose from 26% to 44%,” and “this crisis very much predated the pandemic.” The New York Times also quotes another CDC’s report: “(In the last decade) suicide rates for people, ages 10 to 24, leaped nearly 60 percent.”

In March, columnist David French noted that American teens are merely imitating their parents whose “anxiety and pain they see every day. The parental concerns of previous generations — sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll — have been replaced by a new triumvirate: anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. Our nation’s kids are facing a mental health crisis. Social media is an important factor (in this crisis).” As if trying to catch up with their parents’ more prodigious suicide rate, last year alone, 6,500 American youths between 10 and 24 took their lives. Among the 13-to-18 year-olds, those who took their lives jumped 31%.

The secret is out: Social media, and its main instrument smartphones, are successfully and effectively killing our teenagers. In a recent article entitled “Kids: The Emotional Costs of Social Media,” the Week magazine presents the grim picture of the relationship between teen suicide and social media. Quoting Jonathan Haidt of The Atlantic, the article reports that “Facebook’s products are to blame.” The report goes on: “Social-media platforms weren’t initially designed for children, but they’ve made kids ‘the subject of a gigantic national experiment.’” Coincidentally, high school kids don’t sleep enough, adding to their “poor mental health,” according to one report in the Washington Post.

The Post article confirms the link between rising teen suicide and social media, specifically in the rising “smart-phone ownership (that) crossed the 50 percent threshold in late 2012 — right when teen depression and suicide began to increase. By 2015, 75 percent of teens had access to a smart-phone,” and by 2021, close to 90%.

Although the smartphone ownership level is about the same among all three groups, whites, Blacks and Hispanics, it appears the depression-to-suicide route is particularly a “white” rite of passage (3 or 4 times as high). More urgently engulfed with the existential issues of political and economic struggles, non-white groups stick together and manage to escape the deaths by isolation.

Only three generations ago, white Americans found meaning in their work, family and neighborhood network. There, however precariously, they collected their human needs and found the meaning of life in human networks and neighborhoods. But, expanded cable TV and private digital kingdoms replaced all those life-sustaining communal grapevines and collective roots upon which individuals and groups used to plant their connective runners.

Now, each of us torn apart at the roots, we must helplessly watch our vulnerable teens slowly dehumanizing themselves, just as their parents are doing, and darkening our nation’s future with self-destruction. They get so much of their socialization from social media that traditional parenting has become almost superfluous in America. Teens have built a separate reality, quite alien and incomprehensible to their parents, in which so little emotional authenticity is shared with adults. No teen generation has ever so hungered for love, and has ever received so little of it from their society. America’s adults have in essence abandoned their children. On the night of the Columbine massacre, Dalai Lama told us what he thought had caused it: “Children (in America) are not loved.”

Growing up in a loveless society and a super-self-centered culture that their parents created, America’s children can only look longingly to their early graves.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.

]]>