Ever More Children Are Suffering From Stress
(Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, March 1, 2004)
A quarter of children aged between four and six say they are "stressed out", and the proportion rises to just over half of children under 16, reported a survey published late last week. . . . Evidence of the increasing incidence of children's mental ill-health is reaching mountainous proportions: self-harm, attention deficit disorder, depression and obsessive behaviour have all increased sharply among children in recent years. . . . What was interesting was how this survey was reported as "Britain in danger of breeding a generation of emotional weaklings": this generation of children was more cosseted than any previous one, and more neurotic, and perhaps the two phenomena were connected. The Times concluded in a leader that we are fast becoming a nation of "emotional hypochondriacs" as stress is transformed into a disease by a growing industry of therapists, counsellors and lawyers eager for new business. . . . In another respect, the debate over whether stress is real or manufactured reflects a very modern set of phenomena and urgently requires that the old-fashioned distaste for emotion is abandoned if we are going to grasp the nature of what we are dealing with. There's a real danger of an ostrich mentality, insisting to all the teenagers with suicidal tendencies that what they feel is not real, they're just unwitting victims of a gigantic cultural fraud. That just won't wash. . . . Freud said that human beings oscillate between their need for security and their need for freedom. At some point in the 20th century, we pretty much junked security in favour of freedom. The price we pay for that is a kind of nervy, risk-taking rollercoaster ride of adrenaline and depression. We've replaced lives that were nasty, brutish and short with lives which are insecure, disorientated and long.
posted by Lorenzo 7:26 PM
