Dubious Identity

Gen Z has a shockingly high suicide rate:

The new data suggests Gen Z – or the generation of Americans born during 1997 onward – might be seeing a mental health crisis even worse than that faced by the older millennial generation.

Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. “Deaths of despair,” or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.

While the article doesn’t break suicide out by sex, men in general are four times more likely to commit suicide than women, and I’m seeing no reason to think GenZ men are any different.

Let’s get this straight – bad things happen when you raise a generation of men disproportionately without fathers?

When you pathologize and medicate boyhood traits ’til boys check out of higher education – men are now 40% of college students, headed toward 33% at this rate, which in turn limits their potential for a life partner, since women have an evolutionary preference for men who are more capable of providing, not less?

While labeling male traits “toxic” and actively demonizing them?

Or while mocking and taunting them – look at who plays the buffoon in most advertisements today; while it’s mostly white men, black men are moving into the role more and more. It’s not hard to imagine an 18 year old, coming into a world with a straitened future, where masculinity is demonized and popular culture seems to be grooming you for a future as an impotent nebbish who will at best be the comic relief for a (inevitably, in pop culture) strong, powerful woman, and at worst a villain in waiting?

Bad things happen to people who grow up that way?

Huh. Weird.

I’m not sure we could have lost a generation any more effectively if we’d sent them to fight in the trenches of Flanders.

16 thoughts on “Dubious Identity

  1. So, there have been several conclusive studies that show discussing suicide in the media actually increases suicide in people under the age of 26. It seems counter intuitive that talking about something actually makes it worse. But in the case of suicide, it does.

    The folks talking about suicide on social media and on TV shows are rarely psychologists and, frankly, a little disclaimer at the bottom of the page to call a suicide hotline if you need help is not enough. I think we need to acknowledge the messaging kids are getting and how this approach, according to the increase in numbers we’re seeing, is making things worse.

    THE CONTAGION OF SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/

  2. Excellent perspective and I am afraid all part of a plan of neutering dissent. With no need for masculinity in the armed forces where all killing already is and will increasingly be done via drones controlled by milennials on a couch while eating magic mushrooms and smoking dope, the need for Y chromosome is no longer needed in general populace. A complaint slave is a good slave.

  3. Sorry. Going to college, except, maybe, perhaps you have some profession in mind, is stupid. Especially as described above for men.

    Masculinity may be demonized but women (in any large numbers) aren’t gonna rebuild engines, clean septic systems, or simply change flats, males do. One can become a blue collar worker for little or no money, hardly any debt and live comfortably if not become wealthy.

    Men need to unlearn that going to college is so important.

  4. jdm, easier said than done, especially with the Big Ed droning that you HAVE to do it… or you will die. Can you imagine Big Ed, and by extension marxists, losing ability to sink their hooks and fangs into your precious spawn?

  5. So, there have been…

    Anytime you read, or hear a sentence proceeded by “so”, you know an idiot is about to hurt your brain with some stupid shit.

    It’s 10/10 guaranteed.

  6. “where masculinity is demonized and popular culture seems to be grooming you for a future as an impotent nebbish ”

    HEY, HEY, HEY!!! Watch it with the anti-Semitism, Mr. Berg

  7. It might be even worse, as I suspect that a lot of overdose deaths (now over 100k/year) may be quiet suicides. Hopelessness is a nasty reality for a lot of people these days.

    It’s an interesting fact as well that the gap between male and female pay isn’t narrowing as the proportion of women in college increases. One might suggest that those highfalutin’ college degrees aren’t doing them as much good as they thought they would–and I’d suggest that a lot of it might have something to do with degrees in “xxxx studies”, “administrative assistant”, and (my former sister-in-law) art.

  8. One might suggest that those highfalutin’ college degrees aren’t doing them as much good as they thought they would

    Yeah, what a deal; shuffling papers as a dronette in Acme Megacorp as opposed to raising the next generation.

  9. Raleigh NC TV tonight featured a report that NC State has seen 3 suicides this semester. Certainly in accord with the general trend.

  10. If you are a woman, just out of high school, you can’t make much money, not even in the sex trade (cam girls don’t work out of mansions). But if you are a guy, out of high school you can walk onto a construction site & make several multiples of minimum wage. It makes more economic sense, short and medium term, for a young man to forgo college and for a young woman to enroll in college.
    It’s anecdotal, but from what I’ve seen, the surplus of women in college aren’t becoming rocket scientists. They are getting degrees in social work, education, and business.
    Also anecdotally, the guys who might be the next Einstein but are seduced into the blue collar world by being offered $25 or $30 an hour out of high school aren’t necessarily lost. They rise to their level and become business owners or very highly paid hourly workers.

  11. It was recently brought to my attention that the best part of being a conspiracy theorist is not having myocardia or huge clots.

  12. Golfdoc, the wife and I attend a m/c rally in Rocky mount every year in July. Be passing right through your new turf.

  13. You probably should ask Herschell Walker for advice about raising kids w/o fathers. Even so, I wonder what the percentage of kids raised w/o fathers is vs. that of 20 years ago? I’m betting it’s not so materially higher that it in any way explains the uptick in suicide. FAR more likely is the lack of economic opportunity which exists for far too many in this country. They don’t want to become part of the “machine” part of a dead-end job, working to make a bunch of sick, twisted, evil old men even more rich. Instead, they opt-out, some economically, others, tragically, physically. How the hell do I know, you might ask? Because my brother did exactly that for exactly that reason. In short, he was working himself to death and saw no wait up or out. He had a father, but he also was a teacher in a southern, state high school where they pay them shit because after all, teachers, especially because of teachers unions are lazy shits who deserve little and less, right?

    Your parents (teachers as I recall) would remind you that correlation isn’t causation. In brief that means the small uptick in parentless kids in now way provides evidence of explanation for the rise in suicides, it’s not enough and research hasn’t been done to establish it as THE cause or even a material cause. Instead, like so many crazy-assed stupid as shit justifications for your white-culture coded verbosity, not about really a moral position because you’ve never much cared about kids or moral propriety (you being the GOP writ-large), no you just want to tell others to live “like you do” as if that’s the solution for everyone. So much for self-reliance, individual liberty and small government, but the real irony is, like Walker, you DON’T walk the walk, you just talk the talk.

    Fortunately, last Tuesday, the electorate agreed what happened on 1/6, that even you couldn’t find the moral rectitude to condemn, was too crazy. What the electorate did really made me proud, proud of my fellow Americans for rejecting the lie of voter fraud (or really, the fraud used to suppress legal voting – but yeah, that’s too much of a mouthful for the sound-bite Gen Zers or Xers, or Milenials, or Boomers which make up the GOP of today and to which you appeal with your simplistic, un-reasched and often factless ideas), but what the American people, the American electorate did was to say they chose “Out of touch (Dems) over ‘Out of their f’in minds (Repubs).” In short, they rejected YOU and all the crazy, flat-earth, climate changes isn’t real but voter fraud is, anti-democracy fascists. Next time you choose to lecture about suicide, maybe do some research, you know, like on climate change or voter fraud. Trump is 2-65 in front of various judges, as Eric Hershman (iirc), his lawyer said to Giuliani, before you claim it’s about corruption, ask yourself “All of them, all the judges are corrupt, even the ones we appointed?” Said better, your voter fraud idea is a lie and you damned well know it (just like Climate Change opposition) and so many others. Keep up your chant for being “center right” while saying you want to move the country as far to the right as you can (so much for center) but at least do ONE thing, Mitch, learn. The world needs us to do so and it’s your end of the spectrum which is damning this world to catastrophe, not any other, not fatherless kids, nor those with them.

  14. Say Peevee?

    You should kys, man. Really, its time.

    When you check off the planet, it will make room for some worthy, 75IQ Somali family to immigrate to MN. Show how much you care and leave all your stuff to the local Islamic community center.

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