'Focus on me' is bad advice: Gen Z is most 'aware' of mental health, least happy
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 10
- 2 min read
Updated: May 11
May is Mental Health Awareness month, a "progressive vanity project" that encourages people to medicalize the challenges of everyday life, writes Carolyn D. Gorman, a Manhattan Institute policy analyst, on Unherd. "Focus on me" is one of the slogans. Meanwhile, we're neglecting the seriously mentally ill.
The “DSM” — the mental health field’s diagnostic tool — used to be about "100 pages, listing around 100 diagnoses, she writes. "It's now "10 times longer and clinically classifies everything from jetlag to bad premenstrual syndrome."
Serious mental illness leads to many bad outcomes, including addiction, homelessness, prison and early death, but it's not common, Gorman writes. Schizophrenia affects less than 1% of adults and bipolar disorder less than 3%.
Awareness campaigns have persuaded Americans that we're all sick, she writes. Nearly one in four American adults — and one in three adolescents — received mental health services in 2023.
Members of Generation Z, who have grown up “aware,” are the most treated and most open to discussing mental health, but the least likely to say their mental health is good. Older generations, who weren’t constantly encouraged to focus on their feelings, are happier on average.
Those who really did need help often don't get it. Recently, a seriously mentally ill man who'd stopped taking his medication for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder set fire to the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family, and now faces attempted murder charges, Gorman writes. His family had tried unsuccessfully to have him hospitalized.
"Awareness campaigns downplay the link between violence and mental illness, supposedly to reduce 'stigma,'" she writes. However, "serious mental illness, when left untreated, increases the risk of violence and self–harm. Distracting from this reality undermines the systemic reform needed to reduce mental illness-related violence — which is what really perpetuates stigma."
An article that wasn't properly proof-read before posting. The article is good and advances talking points about how mental health is treated that need to be made. However, the 2nd to last paragraph is missing two words that make their sentences mean something else.