We need to talk about the United States’ mental health crisis – and its larger causes

‘A panel of medical experts has recommended that doctors screen all patients under 65, including children and teenagers, for what the panel calls “anxiety disorders”.’ I want to talk about an uncomfortable topic that needs much more open discussion than it’s receiving: the United States’ extraordinarily high level of anxiety. A panel of medical experts has recommended that doctors screen all patients under 65, including children and teenagers, for what the panel calls anxiety disorders. Lori Pbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan medical school, who serves on the panel, calls mental health disorders “a crisis in this country”. A recent New York Times article discussed what’s called “persistent depressive disorder”, or PDD, which an estimated 2% of adults in the United States have experienced in the past year. Nearly 50,000 people in the US lost their lives to suicide last year, according to a new provisional tally from the National Center for Health Statistics. (The agency said the final count would likely be higher.) The suicide rate, now 14.3 deaths per 100,000 Americans, has reached its highest level since 1941, when the US entered the second world war. Men aged 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year, at nearly 44 per 100,000 people, double the rate of people aged 15-24. While women have been found to have suicidal thoughts more commonly, men are four times as likely to die by suicide. Suicide rates for Native Americans are almost double the rates for other Americans. (Some good news: suicide rates for children aged 10 to 14 have declined by 18%, and for those between 15 and 24 by 9%, bringing suicide rates in those groups back to pre-pandemic levels.) What’s going on? Maybe the widespread anxiety and depression, along with the […]

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