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There’s no snapping out of this

There is a lot to be said for schools and community healthcare services focusing on mental health.
It’s the foundation of our daily lives.
Without a clear head or a sense of purpose, we can’t even begin the day.
Without a shred of self worth, we can’t help others. We sink lower and lower, until we are but a shadow of ourselves, and we quickly become dependent on family, society or authority to support us.
At a young age, this may render us useless. I don’t mean useless to the workplace, the sports team, the classroom or the family unit, although all those are vital things, but useless as contributing members of the intricate web of community.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that mental health and overall wellbeing should be points of attention for schools, healthcare workers, even local government. Watching out for students and taking action, knowing when a health crisis is upon someone, and improving the quality of life for the whole community are cornerstones of our civilization and key characteristics of our advanced society.
What is hard to grasp, however, is not that mental health is vital but with what ease so many find themselves slipping, first in confidence, then in self esteem, then in complete wellbeing.
I don’t agree with the old-timer “snap out of it” mindset because, frankly, that doesn’t help anyone. Essentially, it amounts to an exercise in bullying. The very fact that so few youths and young adults in our society are unable to snap out of it should alert us to an underlying flaw, something that must have gone wrong in the way we and our own elders prepared the road for the next generation.
Not so fast.
We can’t lay all the blame on someone or something and leave it at that. You know that neither fixes anything nor satisfies anyone.
What we can do is analyze the conditions in which today’s younger generations were raised and try to help correct the mistakes, repair the damage, avert future disaster.
By the end of the 1990s, we had handed over much of our communication to modern technology, and it was brilliant. Utterly brilliant. We could send letters in a flash, telephone anyone, anywhere in the world, and open a portal to all human knowledge right on our desks.
We also learned to stop talking to each other in person and reacting to each other in real time. We stopped reading body language, stopped sharing genuine laughter, and we converted our emotions to cartoon symbols.
We gave our children these devices and showed them how to play games, send silly pictures, share jokes, chat with anyone, do all their academic research… and begin to melt into the screen.
What a perfect condition it was, when at the end of 2019 a virus began spreading around the world at lightning speed, giving that impressionable generation every reason to retreat further into its shell, existing now only in simulated smiles.
When, two years later, the doors were flung wide, an entire generation of young people wouldn’t come out. Why? Because it was so much easier, so much safer, so much more comfortable to stay in the known zone, to hide behind the screen and to live as the alter ego.
We cannot be surprised today, in homes from which both parents leave to work more than eight hours each day, that the cocoons are sealed and, honestly, it could quite literally be harmful to break that protective shell.
There’s no snapping out of this. There’s no amount of coddling, of everyone’s-a-winner inclusion, of hugs both real and emoji, to do anything more than sate the one doing the patting.
We pass it all along, don’t we? We offer our feelings and we send the wounded fledgling to the next post along the trail of mental health, but none makes any real progress. Each does the bit in the mission statement and finds it lacking in substance.
We must do more to recognize the signs, to be alert to the genuine need, to intervene and, yes, even to shout it from the rooftops when we find one fallen from the nest.
It’s time to put an end to blithe platitudes and vacuous slogans, to step out from behind the clip-art and avatar, to be the parent, the big brother and big sister.
Failing now is tantamount to shattering the foundations of the new world.