This mental health crisis facing young Americans was born in classrooms, but it is kept alive by the breakdown of the family unit and a drug-first approach to mental illness.

• • 42% of Gen Z have a diagnosed mental health condition.
  • 40% of Gen Z said they’d like to leave their jobs in the near future.
  • 66% of Gen Z feels unprepared for their future.
  • 65% of Gen Z students struggling with mental illness reports missing school in the past month.
  • Gen Zers are 1.5 times more likely to report feeling anxious or depressed than older generations.

The root of Gen Z’s sadness stems from the beliefs they hold about themselves and the world around them. These 3 beliefs are demotivating young people:

1. 1. Equality is not possible without equal outcomes.
   2. The solution to mental illness is medication.
   3. Students benefit from learning about their privilege.

Equal outcomes only equalize downwards, because they are incompatible with genuine success. 

Mental health experts confirm how detrimental participation trophies are to the human mind, because reward that arrives with no effort destroys a person’s drive to succeed. This creates a negative feedback loop, where no matter what they do, success is not worth the reward. Neuroscientists acknowledge how expectations influence the outcomes a person experiences.

The primary purpose behind the manipulation of sadness is to project outcome inequality onto children so that they grow up believing they are only safe when every member of society has the same outcome, which is only possible through brute conformity. 

Gen Z believes that their experiences with inequality are evidence that injustice will always determine their success, and their perceived identity is an integral part of who they are as a person. 

Critical Race Theory is making Gen Z suicidal.

A large portion of Gen Z was raised in broken homes by parents who were told daycare has no negative effect on their child’s development, but after generations of daycare babies, the relevance of attachment is self-evident. 

Studies emphasize how children assess the involvement of the mother, and that there is statistical significance to daycare and the development of healthy mother-child attachment.

According to The Attachment Project, people with attachment disorders struggle to:

• • “form meaningful relationships 
  • maintain a positive sense of self 
  • regulate their emotions”

If the child grows up believing they have a very limited support system and unlimited variables for threat, they will develop trauma responses instead of healthy decision-making processes.

Zoomers are told they are broken, defective, dependent creatures who need medicine to live. 

Parents, teachers, and doctors believe if they do not give children these drugs, they will suffer through life or commit suicide, so families pick between two bad options:

1. 1. “Cure all” chemical lobotomy.
   2. Psychotherapy and special education classes where they are labeled, isolated, and slowed down. 

Young people believe drugs are their best strategy for survival and are encouraged to have identity crises at younger and younger ages, which is causing 3 serious problems for this generation:

1. 1. Drugs alter brain structure.
   2. Experts push drug dependency.
   3. Illness is exacerbated by nutritional cost.

The benefits do not even outweigh the risks of taking the medication. After 2000 studies, psychostimulants weren’t even shown to improve children’s ability to learn in school!

The medical-pharmaceutical industry has become one large negative feedback loop where no problem gets solved, but both the buyer and the seller believe they’ve reached a mutually beneficial resolution. Unfortunately, this resolution is destroying the next generation of Americans.

Teaching has become centered around group learning, meaning all students in the group get the same grade, nobody fails, or grades are eliminated entirely.

These are applications of Social Emotional Learning, which is the psychologizing of schools. SEL was born out of a progressive movement to help foster the health and wellbeing of students, and much of the push to centralize SEL was based on studies on adverse childhood experiences. 

One notable study Dr. Felitti conducted in the 90’s linked childhood trauma to learning problems in school. SEL was marketed as a way to remove psychological barriers of success for students and help them become well-adjusted adults; however, in practice it caused more problems than it solved.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) explains that “today’s SEL is about building a critical consciousness for students with diverse backgrounds through collaborative action and critical examination in hopes of identifying the root causes of inequality.” 

SEL’s “critical examination” and political activism is actively destabilizing Gen Z’s identity as it replaces childhood innocence with determinist ideas about who they are, who they should be, how they should be learning, and what they are capable of. It completely stunts their motivation, ruins kids’ confidence, and makes them less capable of learning new information. 

Overall, a young person’s perceptions play an integral role in their mental health and their success in life. Generation Z has been lied to about equal outcomes, psychiatric drugs, and the significance of the family unit. Lifting Gen Z up out of their sadness starts with the root of their beliefs about themselves and the world around them.