Why Is Our Generation Being Left Riddled With Anxiety and Depression?
The real reason isn't exactly what you think it is.
Mental health has been a big buzzword throughout the 20th century, but why out of any other timeline in history has it seemed to destroy so many millennials’ lives within the past decade?
Stories of depression, and anxiety especially have ricocheted through our generation and have left many of us socially inept — including myself. I have had a lot of experience with both of these invisible illnesses; depression crippling me for nearly two years, I spent most of my life inside, stuck in my chair under a veil of complete grey, a fogginess that would torture me into doing nothing, turning my words into hateful, bitter venom. Anxiety wasn’t as easy to detect as the depression, it took me the full length of my depression to work out I was suffering with it, but anxiety is one that cannot be as easily ‘self-diagnosed’. I knew I struggled with travel anxiety, it was hard for me to go anywhere alone without knowing the exact route, or being able to know what the final destination looked like. Now I get it from time to time, especially in stressful, or crowded situations, but I’ve known many with much more complicated, and debilitating anxieties.
But why are we the first generations to see such influxes with over 264 million people suffering from depression, and over 275 million suffering with anxiety? What’s even more worrying is that women are twice as likely to have anxiety — so what’s going on?
There are some causes that keep cropping up to account for the reason it’s more prominent than ever; the internet, social media, the work/life balance, and now the pandemic. Since the age of the internet started, multiple mental health conditions started stacking on top of one another, as we grew an insatiable appetite for constant content, we weren’t prepared for the devastating effects social media would have on our well being. We are now collectively facing a pandemic together, where we were able to move forward, we were then forced indoors, away from the people we loved, and all we knew, a mental health nightmare; anxiety, depression and other health issues ravaged through the world, and we were sent spiralling into a situation like no other — unable to make sense of what was going on, and stripped of all our freedoms.
Now more than ever we are booking appointments to see specialists, taking multiple medications and despite this the rates are still going up; over 700,000 people commit suicide each and every year, 1 person every 40 seconds.
But I have a theory.
Whilst watching a programme the other day about weight loss (of all things), I noticed on multiple occasions the presenter mentioned “Humans are social beings”, he said it so often I wasn’t really sure why considering the nature of the production, but a few days later I had thought about it again:
“Humans are social beings”
I felt like someone had answered one of the biggest questions pressing society; what if our mental health crisis was because we as a race have lost the ability to be sociable. Some of you are probably thinking ‘but I am sociable, I have X amount of friends and go out every week’ — well that’s not quite what I mean
When we talk about our social groups, a lot of the people that make it up consist of family members, friends from work, school chums, and friends of family. All hand picked by both fate and conditioning.
But if we think back to the years before the industrial revolution, before schools, work places, where we were a part of something bigger, a bigger community — you can see just how out of touch and sterile we have truly become.
We live in boxes surrounded by possessions.
We get into boxes with wheels that can take us anywhere, it will always return us to our box of possessions.
We work in a box.
Eat out in a box.
Pick our clothing from a box.
Put our pictures in a little electronic box that has boxes in it to post through.
We are boxed in.
My theory is that we have completely forgotten how to live for ourselves, we are trapped in a world where stuff is more important than people, we no longer take kindness from strangers, we rarely trust another human being, let alone another race.
We have divided into our own extremely small entities, that quite obviously cannot satiate our sociable nature. I for one am not in the slightest bit sociable, and I recognise how deeply dissatisfied with that part of my life I am, the small number of people that are in my circle are all family, and quite often I find myself in need of more than they could ever provide.
Where we are in the western world, at this point in time, is at a crossroads. Stuck between large-scale health conditions, affecting even children, horrifically high rates of mental health diagnosis, and cases of suicide, and the worlds of old; community, sociability, reliability between one another. The opportunity to get out of our boxes and experience a world of culture, race, and its people. I believe that if we took a leaf out of our more primitive books, it could solve many of the world’s leading problems today — global warming, mental health, and our worldwide consumption rates to name a few. I don’t mean let’s step into the dark ages — but there’s got to be a correlation between how we feel day to day, with the struggles we have in our own minds versus the fact that we are simply neglecting a huge part of our culture that has been lost to years and years of slowly growing apart.
Is there a way we can make it better? There are so many layers to our social issues that date back centuries, we have done some pretty shitty things to one another, completely obliterating countries, races, and religious groups. Annihilation seems to be the only answer we have when we come up against the differences of others; and so it’s safe to say we are much better at taking each other down then co-living with one another, but those layers can be treated, they can be dissected and understood. There could potentially be a world in which we treat the earth and its many peoples, including the animals as equals and strip away the prejudice, racism and cultural appropriations.
We can go back to move forward.
