Teen mental health crisis? Reflections of a Rorschach Eeyore

Spend a ton of money, employ lots of experts, address the symptoms...

“We are thrilled to share a significant milestone in supporting our students’ mental health and well-being”

This surely fantastic news. Milestones don’t come along every few feet. Barriers to well-being come crashing down only once in a while. Definitely worth celebrating. This milestone was the result of the canny deployment of a ‘process improvement specialist’ — a species of unworker evolved to ‘address bottlenecks’ and implement ‘streamlined processes’ in the teen-health-crisis ecosystem.

As anyone who has had anything to do with young adults knows, the most important thing about a mental health crisis is to find a relatable listener and someone with the same identity. The first responder for a suicidal young man would presumably be ‘a specialized counsellor who brings similar experience and identity’ i.e. another suicidal young man; for a self-harming anorexic, a depressed young woman with bulimia; for someone who has talked themselves into some alternative gender identity — a trans-counsellor who has already benefited from ‘top surgery.’ There really is nothing quite like the combination of weaponized empathy and bureaucratic best practice.

Sarcasm aside…

I can’t say that I don’t mean to sound sarcastic. That would be disingenuous. But as the world grows more ridiculous, the problems more acute and the habitual mode of response ever more visibly counter-productive, it’s hard to sustain the role of an honest interlocutor.

There is a kind of Rubin’s vase or Rorschach problem at play — an aesthetic, holistic recognition (or not) of liberal modernity itself as pathological (or not). Those who don’t recognize the wider pathology, see only isolated, individual problems — to be addressed one at a time, by teams of credentialed experts. For the expert class, the integrating pattern of our materialist, secular and individualized society is so naturalized as to be beyond either reproach or political traction. You can’t engage with what you can’t see.

On the other hand, for those who do recognize the pattern, once seen it is impossible to un-see. The immanent rebuke of scorned common sense is everywhere — in the colonization of family and community life, in turn, by faceless corporations and organs of the overreaching state; in the awful architecture; in the passive dependence and enculturated incompetence of successive Peter Pan generations; and in the weakening everywhere of the binding ties of kinship, friendship and place-bound community.

Needless to say, I’m one of those Rorschach Eeyores. I see the stats on teenage mental health. I look at the response in schools and universities and all I can see is a metonymic extension of everything that is perverse and wrong-headed in liberal modernity. We have created a society that is probably ecologically unsustainable. But way before that, we have reached the social and psychological limits of the mass society of individuals.

So just to recap, we have a crisis. But what they call a mental health epidemic, is actually a ‘not knowing how to live’ crisis. We have institutionalized a cultural aversion to the obligations, duties, responsibilities, joys, rite of passage and generational successions that make life meaningful — all this and I haven’t even had to mention God or the Church.

It started in the 1960s with too much sex, too little marriage, a never-ending frenetic but undeniably sociable pub crawl — and the abolition of the category of ‘adult’ and any significant rites of passage pertaining to growing up. It has culminated in the era of zero sex, minimal face-to-face contact, and a pervasive psychological depression so encompassing that, to use a pagan/weather metaphor, we have produced generation of minor weather deities — drizzle gods of the damp and overcast.

To those who were in their prime, the era of endless youth looked and often felt like a lot of fun. The fumbling sex wasn’t necessarily always good. But you can’t argue with eight pints, the odd joint and this or that form of electric blues. So who would have guessed it would end up with a generation of kids that is congenitally lonely, under-socialized, completely unequipped with any generational courting routines, deprived of even the most rudimentary arenas for having fun — or just mucking about; kids who live artificial, sexless, genderless lives online, lives without obligations, responsibilities and often manifesting as much telos as desert gerbil in a swimming pool.

gerbil in swimming pool

Walking around my safe little town in southern Ontario, you never see kids on the street, never a strung out mule train of different sized kids on equally different sized bikes. You never see small gangs of boys throwing stones, or drinking beers by the river or smoking illicit cigarettes. Yes they smoke — but cannabis, and in someone’s basement, often on their own and invariably in the company of only a video game. When I was a nipper — sometime back in the middle Pleistocene — I knew every back alley, ditch, pond, bridge, railway embankment, badger set, abandoned farm house or barn within 20 miles. The present crop barely know how to ride a bike.

I know that I sound like a miserable old ‘gadgie’ as they say in what used to be my part of the world. But my own generation was already well on their way down this road. Phase I was less isolating but no less alienating (see below). I only saved myself by getting married at the old age of 36 — and by some great miracle being lucky enough to have four children with a woman that I love. I discovered old school when I was way too old for school — but better late….

It’s not surprising then, that schools and universities are creating a mental health infrastructure that now constitutes an aspect of their core business and strategic mission. But step back just a couple of decades in your mind’s eye, and it becomes blindingly obvious just how counter productive is this mode of response. It’s also part of a wider pattern of stupidity. Thus for instance, the implicit ‘pattern language’ of our individualist, anti-family, anti-farmer, anti-social, anti-cuisine approach to urban living makes people obese and unhealthy. But our institutional response is to generate new corporate-speak and ‘best practice’; dedicated cadres of public health experts; personal health devices (Fitbits; Lumen); faddish health practices; nutraceuticals; diets; gyms, personal trainers; iPhone apps; new wonder drugs; fat-studies journals; and ‘fat positivity’ ideology. As a society we are able to anything and everything except to address the underlying problem — which is a failure to thrive; and thriving is what happens when humans orient their shared life together to pretty common sense intuitions about morality and virtue.

How would a Rorschach Eeyore address the student mental health crisis? The thing about systemic solutions is that they are politically impossible but technically so simple. In a perverse way, creating more health centres, streamlined procedures for processing patients and more funding for diverse counsellors, makes the problem worse. It does almost nothing to stem the inflow of disoriented and discombobulated kids. Rather the opposite. The supply side expansion of ‘health infrastructure’ creates an incentive structure and embeds a culture of expectations that normalizes victimhood, identity crisis and psychological distress as a strange marker of psychological virtue. In the same vein, the normative architecture of ‘accessibility’ and ‘accommodations’ increases the flow of ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, depression and any number of special circumstances that make objective testing, let alone ranking, not just impossible, but immoral. All of a sudden the link between examination and accreditation — the entire purpose of the university system — has been severed in the interests of the new strategic mission which is equity.

Clearly this can’t continue. The system will break down — eventually. The buck will stop, when the bucks stop, which will be when it dawns upon employers that the university system no longer provides a useful service or product. Until then, the naked emperors will continue their perambulations. It’s not a pretty sight.

The systemic, post-liberal solution would be to stop treating students as atomized individuals — but rather as members of a community, of an extended family. And as members of a family — preferably one that includes faculty — on entering the campus community, students would immediately become encumbered with duties, obligations and relations of interdependency. Halls of residences, sororities, fraternities, faculty and school affiliations would come with ascriptive routines and cycles of the kind of work that is necessary to make any community tick: kitchens, gardens, estates maintenance, operating the bar, running the coffee shop.

Ascription

The key word is ascription. None of this can be voluntary. The mental health crisis is a function of a surfeit of freedom without responsibility. In the first decades of the crisis, this played out with sexual promiscuity and other forms of somatic concupiscence. With the Internet, both depravity and depravation have moved online. If there are natural law solutions, they are as common sensical and intuitive as family life. They involve doing the things that we have been doing together, in small groups, for hundreds of thousands of years: cooperating, working together, sharing the load, cooking, eating, feasting, nurturing children, growing things and looking after animals — and mainly moderating our own individual wants and desires in accordance with what works for those around us. This used to be called growing up. There were rites of passage that marked its phases, on both the flood-tide and the ebb-tide. The tides of life were all marked indelibly with cycles of work, play, community collaboration and of liturgical obeisance. What we now see from without as landscapes — aesthetic tableaus of which we are not a part — our ancestors experienced from within, as ‘taskscapes’: land, habitat, species, artefacts that came in and out of our daily experience with the rotation of the seasons. A newly planted hedge intimated a schedule of collaborative activity with the neighbours’ lads five years hence when the hedge needed to be laid; a ploughed field intimated a harvest celebration come the autumn; apple blossom evoked the drunken conviviality of the cider house; the trill of a reed warbler might evoke memories of cutting bundles of thatch for a barn roof the previous autumn.

The bottom line is that in an ascriptive life, there is less time for individual feelings of insecurity, victimhood, identity, sadness, depression, failures of meaning or metaphysical anxiety. Such a life unfolds with the guaranteed togetherness of a sled-dog team: there is precious little opportunity even to take a solitary shit. For sure, there are good things about the space that has opened up for personal introspection in our society of individuals. And perhaps we don’t want to roll it all the way back. But in the student mental health crisis, individual breakdown is just a symptom. The crisis is societal. We have pushed the stick too far in the direction of choice, mobility, viscosity and freedom. Most people need more responsibility, more community, more obligations and to be more encumbered. We should marry earlier, have children earlier and aim to be younger grandparents with a more lively gait and a joy in our ongoing responsibilities within a family.

No — we can’t achieve that overnight. Christian families can’t stand outside the cultural tides of modernity. The wider crisis has an impact on our own children. We too have to negotiate the internet, drugs, sexual mores and all the rest. But how would a Rorschach Eeyore address the mental health crisis?

If I could do one thing in my university, it would be to put in a large petting zoo on campus — and a couple of large farms off-campus. I would then require all students and faculty to become be available for moderate physical work growing crops, brewing beer for the bar, tending to animals and processing and cooking food. Nobody would be able to spend every Saturday at the top of some awful brutalist tower block masturbating, playing video games or doom scrolling on TikTok — not every Saturday.

Encumbered from their first day, the life of the community would grasp each one of us by the scruff of the neck and throw us into a life together. It’s very hard for exuberant kids to clean out pigs without them throwing shit at each other and mucking about. Having fun comes naturally. It really does. It’s very hard to spend an hour digging potatoes and not feel a kind of satisfaction satisfied. It’s fun using a chainsaw to harvest firewood and driving a ride-mower. Drudgery comes from endless repetition. But a cycle of diverse co-operative tasks that can’t be avoided has the effect of pulling people into life— into mutual relation with each other.

It really is that simple. Not all, but most of the mental health crisis would disappear. But of course — politically, this solution is only see-able to the Rorschach Eeyore, who has already fallen into a way of seeing, and has become committed to an immanent critique of liberal society. Liberals will just see an endless succession of grazed knees that need plasters. Deep down, they don’t really want a real solution — because the application of expert responses to endlessly proliferating symptoms has become part of the mission. Bandaids. It’s what they do.