I am hearing a lot about mental health of young people in the United States. The stats are depressing. No pun intended. Kids are dying from self-harm and drugs. This is a wicked problem.

I don’t know the stats for Canada, but I know from experience that they must be similar and can’t be good. In fact, Jonathan Haidt , an American social psychologist who studies problems like this empirically, has said that the same statistics prevail in both Canada and the UK, making clear that they evince a western problem not just an American problem.

Young people are suffering. And young people should not suffer. That job belongs to old people and we shouldn’t give it up without a fight.

Kids  are dying in huge numbers on account of suicide and drugs. More than ever before.  One would think this would call for action–sort of like a war effort.

A good friend of mine actually knows something about the subject. Unlike me. He worked for many years in Brooklyn as nurse with indigent children and has decades of experience.  He tells me this problem is not a new one. People were just not paying attention. When he received  an award for New York City employees way back in 1992 he called for “a Marshall plan for children” in the city.  Actually, one is needed for the entire country and Canada too. “Unsurprisingly,” he said, “no such plan was forthcoming.”  He called the region where he worked with neo-natal children “a health care war zone.”  But as he pointed out, shoutouts from neonatal nurse practitioners don’t usually trigger changes in public policy like complaints by political leaders of western democracies.

Problems with the heath of young people in America, the richest country in the world, have been well known for decades but little or nothing was done until Joe Biden put the child tax credit into effect during his first year in office and this reduced poverty among children by an astounding 50% in 2021, but characteristically, when the Republicans took over control of the American House of Representatives they acted quickly to get rid of that ‘unnecessary’ expense. Tax cuts for rich people are important. What are poor children worth?  Republicans, including the 80% of Evangelicals who support them, care about “children” in the womb, but  outside the womb not so much.

Frankly, my friend is understandably pessimistic that things will ever improve. I hope he is wrong. I fear he is right. We seem to be doomed.