Something I have found with working with teens who experience increased mental illness is that they no longer come to trained adults, but will process their crisis with other youth who are also in crisis themselves. They don't come to mom or dad for help. They go to their smartphones instead. They are looking for validation and relief in the wrong places. By the time they come to us, they have taken to heart some scary ideas, fed to them by strangers on social media. They also dont understand that a 20 hour a week job does not mean your first car will be a $50,000 sports car. They dont understand money, saving, and are extremely impulsive. I work a lot with self harm and find that even though the actual trigger may be an hour away, the smartphone is the tool they use to actually sabotage themselves. Once that becomes their pattern, it is very hard to teach self control.

I’m a 20 year old woman, through watching a lot of videos like these and observation i think that this a multi-faceted issue that will likely be very hard to tackle. Socially, children now are much more sheltered. This isn’t just because of changing stigmas though and more cautious parents, it’s also because of the way our cities and suburbs are designed. Despite the changing culture, in Europe, children as young as 5 still bike to school themselves. This isn’t because the parents are less cautious there necessarily.. but because their infrastructure and city planning allows for that freedom. In the USA it isn’t that way, the huge majority of people here have to own a car to get around and our cities are not bike friendly. Suburbs are often far removed from city centers and also are not conducive to biking or even walking. This makes it is it’s just less safe for children to have optimal freedom. And of course this was worsened in the 90s when the serial killer sprees went wild and people became very afraid of strangers in vans handing out candy. Then, you add in social media, which of course the vast majority can see issues with heavy social media use. Increased focus on the self often can breed neuroticism, which may manifest as narcissism but may also manifest as a variety of mental illnesses that we are seeing. But mental illness itself isn’t only caused by social media, because alongside growing social media use so did the use of hormonal birth control, antidepressants, and use of plastics and pesticides that pollute our waterways and our air. Hormonal birth control unfortunately has a lot of significant side effects that are not talked about.. it depletes several important nutrients that are crucial for health, for example, and most doctors do not tell you this before they prescribe it to you. So many women in this country have depleted key nutrients. They also are not having regular hormonal cycles and producing progesterone which protects them from significant chronic stress. Then, antidepressants. I know only one person who is on them and wants to stay on them. The vast majority of people I speak with are trying to get off but cannot because of the significant withdrawals. And they are heavily overprescribed.. alongside the growth of antidepressants so did the awareness of mental health. Of course many cannot agree, did the mental illness come first, or are we simply more aware of the mental illness that’s always been here? Who knows, all I know is that this movement has also taken several wrong turns and began to tell people who are sad, which is a healthy response to a sad event, are instead suffering from some illness that’s caused by some physiological problem like (chemical imbalance) has been disproved by the way at least in the case of depression. Then, you have the huge portion of plastics and other pollutants being found in large amounts in human tissues. I can only theorize but I’m sure this may have something to do with the rising amount of autoimmune disorders.. not to mention depression is heavily linked to general inflammation and illness. Autoimmune disorders is when your immune system wrongly attacks your own body, but if you have thousands of micro plastics within your tissues it’s safe to say that your immune system may be attacking these foreign particles and by extension your own body. But idk, this is just a harebrained theory. Don’t get me started on how most of our everyday products disrupt our endocrine system. Basically, we are in a perfect storm from all directions creating significant mental health issues in young people. The remedy? Stay off social media, eat as clean as you can within reasonable means, which in my opinion would mean growing the majority of your own food and supporting local farmers, get more involved in your community and strengthen social bonds, try to make the majority of your household items or replace them items that are designed by other people you can actually talk to. Avoid drugs as much as possible. Then maybe a lot of people would feel at least 40% better.

We hold a conference teaching creativity and good life practices to college-age students...by being open, available, and honest with the gen z attenders, we learned some very interesting things that the world seems like it will be very surprised about. One of them is almost every single student said that when they text, they are not texting the same person they see in real life...so one student's girlfriend, for example, was actually two girlfriends...and they both viewed it as two different relationships that had different components. Fascinating!

I listened to the podcast of this interview and thought it was excellent! Highly recommended!

I really feel people need to talk about this more. This was an excellent talk

Thank you. Learn a lot about the data. Hello from Jakarta. Indonesia.

Saludos estimado Carey Nieuwhof, saludos desde Manta Ecuador, lo felicitio por esa excelente entrevista a la psicologa Jean Twenge, un tem de mucha preocupacion a nivel mundial mas que todo con nuestros hijos no se que futuro les espera si se desconecta con el mundo real y se meten de lleno al mundo VIRTUAL. Ya que esto depende mucho de los valores y principios que nos dieron nuestros padres son los mejores a gente nacida entre los años de 1960 a 1900. fuimos criados con mucho valores y principios fueron hasta la actualida la mejor generacion y en la actualidad los hijos se salen de las manos de los padres. hay que aprovechar la tecnologia en bin no en mal claro que ya denpende de la formacion de cada hogar, pero muchos hijos en la actualidad hasta el respeto a los padres les faltan el respeto por la tecnologia, en realidad da mucha pena la adolecencia de este tiempo. excelente video para verlo con los hijos de las nievas generaciones a partir de 1995

Bu röportaji bende dinlemeyi çok isterdim Turk olduğum için sadece yorumları Türkçe'ye otomatik olarak çeviriyorum.Dilerim Türkçesi iyi olan bir İngiliz bunun cevirmenini yapar

"Had to take my finals late, because I went to Vegas for my birthday" 😂

Hey Carey where can I contact you?

As long as The Church is structured on the top priority it currently has it will fail increasingly. That priority is: creating income for seminary graduates.

As a Gen Z who graduated high school in '21, we're becoming more pessimistic as we are being robbed of "special memories" (graduation, parties, vacations, etc.) to the point where we (gen Z's) are seeing them as "meaningless traditions. This is a cause of keeping us socially distanced and having online school for a year and a half, then graduating completley virtually. Then adding into the mix; those of us who chose not to get vaccinated out of personal choice. Unvaccinated young adults and teens are becoming the biggest social outcasts and second class citizens in human history. So the myth that gen Z is all-inclusive is a big lie.