Youth is Under Threat

The American Psychiatric Association has issued an alert via Psychiatric Times to the effect that American youths between the ages of 15 and 25 are at risk of psychiatric morbidity from anxiety/depression, opioid addiction, e vaping nicotine or THC (the active ingredient of marijuana) or simply the vaping carrier or agent. The CDC has issued a warning against the practice across the board citing cardiopulmonary, renal, splenic, neurogenic collapse, etc.

Some of the problem is related to the transfer of neurological function that characterizes adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by typical onset schizophrenia, and some of it relates to the nest departure and the assumption of increased dependence on a peer group. For a select group whose economic and academic circumstances enable them to be enrolled in college, the increased performance expectations and the need to adapt to the college environment is harmful. Youth also participate in the increase in sexually transmitted illness. With chlamydia and gonorrhea topping syphilis and HIV, of course generation Z is in trouble, because X,Y, and millennial's are in trouble.

Across the parameters of race, social class, nominal, religious affiliation, sex and gender, generation Z is a troubled inheritor of the American Dream. It may be that the dream itself is in need of change. That change has to do with the realization that the planet itself is at risk of becoming a hopelessly hostile environment. Without cooperation, sharing, addressing climate change and the loss of species, it may be too late for universalism. But the U.S.A. and the American Democracy rooted in the constitutional republic of people who have not forgone their access to affordable health care and who understand the problems of gun control, water access, climate change and loss of biodiversity, insist on informed representation and follow up responsibility which may give generation Z a chance to work on mankind's future.