The perception in society is that today’s teenagers are more able than ever to take on the pressures of daily life and be successful, and for most of us, that seems to be the case. But what happens when this façade is lifted? A new study showed that five times as many high school and college students suffer from anxiety and other mental health issues as people of the same age did during the Great Depression. Five times! Five universities participated in the study, analyzing Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) tests taken by 77,576 high school and college students between 1938 and 2007. This prompted me to wonder, what has so profoundly changed in society that this statistic could spike so high?

I asked other students at my high school to weigh in. According to many of my peers, this is the fault of high schools and colleges. Students attest that schools put too much pressure on students to be successful, which leads to a very high level of stress. One student told me that her friends often call her up at 12 midnight or 1:00 AM complaining that they are unable to finish all of their work, or they are suffering from insomnia, or just plain stress.

However, my peers did not place the blame on the shoulders of academics alone. They believe that this increase in teen mental illness is partially the fault of parents, and the increased pressure that they put on their children. Although many if not most parents pressure their children to be successful in order to benefit the children, it still produces anxiety and stress. Now there is pressure not only to succeed in A.P classes, but also to be captain of a sports team or president of a club, and to accumulate community service hours. To the modern teen, these parental expectations are just a part of life, but they do put a strain on the psyches of many adolescents.

More surprisingly, the numbers of certain mental illnesses went up even more than five times. There has been a steep rise in hypomania, a disorder that produces anxiety and unrealistic optimism, depression, and psychopathic deviation, which means having problems accepting authority and feeling exempt from the rules. According to my peers, they have not seen a prevalence of these disorders among teens that they know; however teenagers are often experts at deception.

Perhaps this rise in mental illness is not the fault of one single institution, or even a group of them. Maybe it is just the byproduct of a changing society. In the age of the Internet adults and teenagers alike want all the information, and all the success, right now. They will settle for nothing less than instant gratification, and sometimes this is a good thing. It prompts healthy ambition and self-confidence. However, when teens fall behind, or feel that they can’t measure up to the standards of this changing world, the effects are detrimental.

Please write in and tell me what you think!

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