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Sure life can be difficult, but is it anywhere close to how difficult as it was say during the great depression or WWII?
Well, people took meds back then, too.
They were just less open about it. Do you think taking insulin, thyroid meds, or blood pressure meds to be a sign of weakness? Why are people weak if they take meds to improve their mental health?
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Too easy to get a prescription for is why so many do the drugs they do. If doctors stopped over prescribing, many that don't really need to, won't be on drugs they are currently taking.
Student loan debt, insufficient economic opportunity, rising COL, political uncertainty, awareness of previously subtle sexual harassment.
All I can say is......duh!
And guys don’t want to admit, can’t afford, or seek help for depression, which is the only reason men have lower numbers. You’re looking at one of them.
Two men that I'm close to in life, are on anti anxiety meds. One of them is my step son, and the other is my oldest bio son. Meds have helped both of them tremendously. As a mother, it makes me sad that either of them had to suffer for so long...but I'm happy for both of them, that meds have made a positive impact on their lives.
Sure life can be difficult, but is it anywhere close to how difficult as it was say during the great depression or WWII?
You really need to stop with the historical comparisons. It's apples and oranges on many levels.
Today:
-Crippling student debt
-Bare bones benefits IF you can find a well-paying job in your field. This sets up future anxiety. If you don't start saving for retirement in your 20s your financial situation in your 70s is bleak.
-Incessant bombardment by media/social media etc of images, lifestyles, activities you're supposed to aspire too, even if they're an illusion.
None of this existed in past times.
I don't doubt people are overprescribed, but as several posters have pointed out, generally speaking women seek help more often than men.
Also, the suicide rate for males is four times that of females. So maybe more men should be seeking meds.
They're depressed because so many of them were raised to be princesses and told that they "can be anything they want when they grow up." I think they were also raised to believe that they're supposed to be happy every second of every day.
Sorry, the real world doesn't work that way for most people.
In fairness, a lot of the males were raised to believe the same nonsense. Too many people running around out here who think they're special.
For those saying "well, men aren't getting the meds they need" well, sure to a certain degree. But the fact is the challenges and issues both young men and young women today face is NOTHING compared to what our forefathers and mothers faced at all. Young men and women today are living in the best times in all of human history, there's no reason either men or women should have to be taking cocktails of meds by any significant degree. Incidentally enough, I remember reading an article a while back that stated there is actually a far lower rate of depression among those that are living in war zones.
"Best times in all of human history". Hmmmm. Maybe it's the future they are depressed and worried about. A future that, more than likely, will contain cataclysmic events regarding climate change. It's probably too late to do anything that will really mitigate the effects and many educated people know that.
Have you bothered to ask any of these women what they are feeling and why? What their anxiety is about?
I'm an older Boomer so I will likely be dead before more dramatic climate things happen more regularly. But millennials and Gen-Z will experience them.
I'm not on any meds myself, but I know many who are. I think it's the simplest reason imaginable. A lot of people are on meds because meds are readily available. Life sucks and is very hard regardless of what era you were born in. Problems are just replaced by different problems. I'm sure plenty of Pioneer women were horribly depressed. They didn't really recognize depression as a disorder back then. People just did what was needed to survive, or they didn't, and they died.
If you give people an option to use drugs to feel better, a large percentage of society is going to take advantage of that. And that would've been true at any era had those drugs been around.
This, and why should there be a stigma about treated mental health issues with medication? If you have allergies you can take medication. If you have chronic migraines you can take medication. If you have high blood pressure you take medications. But if you have depression or anxiety you're just supposed to suck it up?
In addition to a lot of the factors already explained, which I agree with...
I also think that looking at what the OP is saying in a micro/macro way, with my own life as an example and a sense of "maybe this is a thing?"...
When you are struggling to survive, and I mean literally house and feed yourself and more significantly your kids, when your life is full of legitimate unavoidable crisis like war zones, disasters, etc...you don't really have the time or space to be in your own head thinking about your issues. You shove them to the side, bury them, to maybe be looked at another day. It's that whole Maslow's Pyramid thing. Sometimes the self gets lost in the struggle.
I know that when I was with the ex, I presented to myself and the world this very strong, unflappable persona. I was not interested in thinking about my own psychology or looking at any of my own issues. I had to focus on my ex's issues, and the constant emergencies and logistical struggles created by the life we lived. And I couldn't be there for myself when I had to be there for my kids, and a lot of sources were telling me that anything that even slightly looked like "selfishness" was a crime. Being a bad mother was the worst thing I could imagine, so I directed all of my warmth and energy at the kids and really neglected myself.
Now, in the last few years, I've had the space to explore my own brain. My kids are older, I am partnered with a loving and supportive man, no one is demanding that I give 100% focus to them and generating survival challenges constantly for me to try and manage. I do feel that I am generally a fairly sane and stable person who does not need medication, but now it's like I have my own permission to feel things that I feel, to explore why I think and feel and believe what I do, to pay some attention to my own needs in ways I never did before.
But lest we forget though, there was a period in history where women of the middle to upper-middle class, and especially women of privilege, were heavily medicated with opium, over-the-counter, for various "women's" problems and getting "treatment" for "hysteria" and all sorts of wild stuff. The lower class women probably weren't as much, because they had work to do if they wanted to eat and care for their kids. They probably didn't have the time or money luxury of doping up and sleeping all day for something as trifling as menstrual cramps.
As a 34 year old millennial man I can't say I am that surprised, I have noticed so many women in my age group just seem so sad and depressed. I may get some flack for saying this, but I find it hard to believe most young women today have to endure anything CLOSE to the obstacles and challenges women in the past went through; say pioneer women, women travelling along the Oregon trail or heck, how they would have around 14 kids and be lucky if half of them survived to adulthood. I can certainly understand needing them for traumatic things such as rape, sexual assault and other equally traumatic things but surely so many shouldn't need them for just general life issues everyone goes through.
Makes me happy that I am engaged to a Gen X woman who is very fun and happy and certainly isn't taking any depression/anxiety meds.
What was the context of the article? "Members" of what?
You can't compare generations and take away their right to be unhappy or anxious just because they didn't have to walk miles 10 through 3 feet of snow to get to school, uphill both ways....there are other stressors that we did not have. I can say being a young person was very difficult for me, I had a lot of insecurities and issues....if social media had existed then, I don't know how I'd have survived emotionally.
Why on earth should women have to meet some criteria of having suffered as much as _______ in order to justify being depressed and anxious? I don't have it bad compared to women in Africa holding their starving babies, but that doesn't make me immune from depression. There is a depression called "situational depression" that would be based on a circumstance in your life, i.e. someone dies, or you're sad cause you have to walk the Oregon Trail, that's situational depression. Most depression in this country is based on a chemical imbalance, which has nothing to do with life circumstances. Anxiety too. In my family we all have genetic predisposition to anxiety.
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