The Kids are Not Alright: A Response to Rod Dreher’s Article Regarding Generation Z Sexuality

The Flaming Eyeball:

Another factor in all of this is the mental health crisis. It’s hard to attract a date when you are depressed and just want to lay in bed all day. Among the young, clinical neuroses such as depression and anxiety are being treated at record levels, often with libido-suppressing drugs. At many colleges, a third or more of students have mental health diagnoses, up to over 40% at the worst. It is also worse among young women. At some schools where the problem is worst, 48% of female undergraduates have been diagnosed with at least one mental health condition in their lives, along with 32% of males. 26% of undergraduates in the official survey have been diagnosed with two or more mental health conditions. (https://boynton.umn.edu/sites/boynton.umn.edu/files/2019-09/CSHS-2018-UMN-Twin-Cities.pdf) This is a major crisis, which has hardly received any attention at all. Attending many in-person campuses in America in this day and age is literally living in a mental asylum. This was true at the end of the last decade: it’s undoubtedly worse this year because of COVID, as universities imprison students in their rooms with no tuition discount. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/business/colleges-coronavirus-dormitories-quarantine.html) When I visited my university, it was the only place I have ever seen where most people, including the students, wear their masks outside, terrified of death from the flu. The mental problems often lead to overeating, which makes people obese, cutting, which leaves terrifying scars on people’s limbs, and social withdrawal, which makes it hard to meet people. People are also more paranoid: a significant fraction of college-age girls interpret behavior as simple as basic compliments about their appearance as sexual harassment. Each of these changes makes the people of my generation less attractive and less willing to pursue. When you add them together you get a picture of sluggish, isolated, tortured paranoiacs, for whom sex and romance are the least of their worries.