Modern society, with its emphasis on material possessions and indifference to community, is making us mentally ill. It’s an argument that wouldn’t seem out of place on the Sunday talk shows, but in this case, it’s appearing in the academic journal Clinical Psychology Review, and the argument is backed by decades of data and a cognitive model that attempts to make sense of the process. The data suggests that there has been an increase in a standard measure of mental problems among individuals in their late teens and early 20s, and that the trend dates back at least to the 1930s.
The authors mention that a variety of studies have found mixed results when examining the time course of mental health within the US. Some of the studies that have attempted to address this problem have attempted to extrapolate trends using surveys of people in different age groups, but these studies suffer from two problems: mental health doesn’t remain static during an individual’s lifetime, and those with serious mental disabilities (such as clinical depression) tend to die younger than their peers.
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