In his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, makes a very captivating case that the dramatic rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people in the past decade is not a coincidence of any sort, but the consequence of a fundamental shift in childhood itself. He argues that we have moved from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood,” stripping away the unsupervised free play, peer-driven risk-taking, and embodied human interaction that once helped children become resilient. At the same time, he warns, parenting and schooling have become increasingly protective in the physical world while remaining alarmingly permissive in the digital world, resulting in a generation of anxious, socially isolated, and neurologically rewired by screens. As we begin to explore practical advice for mental health and self-care, Haidt’s opinion offers both a key to understanding the crisis and a plan on how to move forward.

I wanted to begin this article with a short summary of the book The Anxious Generation because Haidt does an excellent job in summarizing so many complex statistics and thoughts in his book. Not only does this help us to think about how we (the children he is speaking about) go about the future but it also helps us in realizing how we are seen to the outside perspective. There are times in life where the world seems like it’s closing in on you and only you, everyone feels that way at some point, it’s human. And when those times creep over our shoulders, we feel weak and oppressed by being in the nature of it’s shadow. This can be caused by a myriad of things, like Haidt said, the effects of the digital world on everyone, specifically the children in the world, it can be caused by personal problems, with oneself, family, friends, partners, etc, whatever the case may be it’s important to note that life’s about that, it’s about those ups and downs you feel, the times where you feel like maybe you’ll get swallowed up by the shadows that consume your everyday life and the times where you realize that there is so much more to life than letting the darkness take hold of you, by realizing that, you are able to escape them.

Whenever I think about the statistics on mental health these days and how it has changed over the years, it always alarms me. For example, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “Among U.S. adolescents (aged 12-17), 1 in 6 experienced a major depressive episode, 3 million had serious thoughts of suicide, and 31% increase in mental health related emergency department visits.” When taking in all this information, it almost leaves you dumbfounded. To even think about how these people may be feeling, what type of lives they are leading, what type of future they will have, if they’ll have a future. It leaves you to think about it all, which is why I feel like it’s important to speak on the subject. Sometimes when we are constantly being reminded of something, it begins to just feel redundant, like a speech we’ve heard countless and countless times we can recite it word for word, but when it comes to this subject, no matter how many times we listen to it, there’s always something new to take from it.

Ultimately, what I wanted to come out of writing this article was the point that mental health is as serious issue as everyone puts it out to be. If you are dealing with some metal health issues on your own right now, know that you’re not alone, there are countless ways to get better, and that people care. That is one serious thing, I believe some people don’t understand. When you are not okay, there will always, always, be someone that cares. And if you aren’t dealing with mental health problems at the moment, try helping those who are, and know that it’s still important for you take care of yourself and prioritize your well-being everyday. Some people think that just because they’re are okay now means that they won’t experience any problems later on, but that’s not true. Sometimes it can hit us when we least expect it to, What’s important is to know how to accept it and heal, not for anyone but yourself because as important as anyone in your life is. You are the most important person in your life, and there is no changing that.