My experience with 22 and 19 year old daughters has been that concepts like trauma and violence are used very loosely by their peers and influencers like educators, who espouse the view that any kind of adversity should be dealt with by retreating to a safe space and or obtaining professional intervention. This sort of learned fragility leads to a lack of resiliency and coping skills, which begets poor mental health outcomes (real or imagined).
That, and an unhealthy dose of social contagion. A friend working at a summer camp just told me how forty girls experienced medical distress from smoke during the recent forest fires. When emergency services arrived and examined everyone, only the four with pre-existing conditions (asthma etc) were actually suffering from physical symptoms.
Like you, I don't claim to "know" but will toss out a few possibilities:
- Unlike today's kids (as a grandparent it is appalling to me) how free my generation was to not be continually under parental supervision and protection, reflecting a low trust society impeding social development. This alone may be a reason behind increased screen time and social media.
- institutionalized Gender Dysphoria promotion and enabling, including irreversible medical procedures on pre and early teens.
- lack of critical thinking and history in education and instead, cultural Marxism.
- increasing sense of economic hopelessness of a K shaped economy and regulatory stasis, likely gleaned through parents.
My guess is that the differences wouldn't be large enough to be remarkable - especially since the numbers of respondents to this specific question in the 2025 version of the survey was so much lower.
I suspect that a lot of this has to do with a sparsity of data for youth mental health in previous generations. Perhaps you would get a better signal by using the rate of suicide by year as a proxy for mental health to see if there's actually an increase in mental illness.
Interesting thought. I just looked up Statistics Canada data for suicides (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=1310039401). Oddly, their numbers for 15-24 year olds have been steadily **dropping** since 2000 (the earliest year available - dropping from 20.4/100k to 9.7/100k). Although rates among just males fell, while females more or less grew incrementally.
My experience with 22 and 19 year old daughters has been that concepts like trauma and violence are used very loosely by their peers and influencers like educators, who espouse the view that any kind of adversity should be dealt with by retreating to a safe space and or obtaining professional intervention. This sort of learned fragility leads to a lack of resiliency and coping skills, which begets poor mental health outcomes (real or imagined).
That, and an unhealthy dose of social contagion. A friend working at a summer camp just told me how forty girls experienced medical distress from smoke during the recent forest fires. When emergency services arrived and examined everyone, only the four with pre-existing conditions (asthma etc) were actually suffering from physical symptoms.
That 100% tracks. If all the cool kids are on SSRIs for anxiety...
Like you, I don't claim to "know" but will toss out a few possibilities:
- Unlike today's kids (as a grandparent it is appalling to me) how free my generation was to not be continually under parental supervision and protection, reflecting a low trust society impeding social development. This alone may be a reason behind increased screen time and social media.
- institutionalized Gender Dysphoria promotion and enabling, including irreversible medical procedures on pre and early teens.
- lack of critical thinking and history in education and instead, cultural Marxism.
- increasing sense of economic hopelessness of a K shaped economy and regulatory stasis, likely gleaned through parents.
I'd like to see a study like this that further dived the Students into Left of Centre and Right of Centre groups.
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My guess is that the differences wouldn't be large enough to be remarkable - especially since the numbers of respondents to this specific question in the 2025 version of the survey was so much lower.
I believe that YOUR GUESS IS WRONG.
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WHY ??? Because I have attended over 100 protests in Downtown Toronto and I know very well who the Lefties who attend them are.
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I'm not sure I'd call that crowd "left of centre" - they'd be closer to the "far left" cohort that I assessed in the original analysis.
I suspect that a lot of this has to do with a sparsity of data for youth mental health in previous generations. Perhaps you would get a better signal by using the rate of suicide by year as a proxy for mental health to see if there's actually an increase in mental illness.
Interesting thought. I just looked up Statistics Canada data for suicides (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=1310039401). Oddly, their numbers for 15-24 year olds have been steadily **dropping** since 2000 (the earliest year available - dropping from 20.4/100k to 9.7/100k). Although rates among just males fell, while females more or less grew incrementally.