I recently found an article that mentions the fact that “the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.”
Part of me thinks this is totally true. The stress of school can sometimes be so much that we feel like we could snap at any time. While I was writing my senior research paper, I definitely felt that way.
Another part of me is coming up with all kinds of ways one could refute this statement. The article doesn’t back it up with any specific evidence. I don’t think that there is really any fool-proof way to compare high school students today with psychiatric patients of the 50s. The things we have anxiety about are completely different than the things that these people would have had anxiety about. On what scale do we measure anxiety? How much hair falls out? How short we bite our nails?
