Here's the comment I posted on the NPR website:

I am just as dismayed by this piece as I was by the first one -- at the one sided way in which this is being presented as if the only thing stopping our college kids from having good mental health is for them all to rush to their nearest mental health professional. It simply isn’t true. Just as it’s not true that the kids who are arriving on campus medicated with antidepressants and antipsychotics wouldn’t even have been able to attend college ten years ago. That’s ridiculous. Educate yourselves please about the adverse effects of these drugs. Most of these meds make mental health worse over time, not better. Many kids are arriving on campus more mentally ill than they ever would have been if they hadn’t been treated with meds at all. Yes, there is evidence that this is the reality. Why do you think there are so many more mentally ill young people? It’s not just because the stressors in our environment are worse than ever before – or that we’ve become supremely clever in diagnosing all sorts of cases that slipped under the radar screen before. It’s because kids are being medicated with stimulants, antidepressants and worse from a very young age and it’s coming at the price of mental well being if the media and the public would only open their eyes to the truth of the situation. The drugs mask symptoms and then they exacerbate them. They are not healing. What if the outcomes for these kids would actually be better if they didn’t get diagnosed and medicated? The truth is that in the majority of the cases, if not all of them, they would be better off.

This piece gets a D for investigative reporting in my book. Listeners will ultimately pay the price if they buy what is being presented here literally.

I can't find a history of the rise of psychology and counseling as professions in the US or a date that public schools started having school counselors, but I would bet that as the number of people trained as mhps, i.e. trained to make a living diagnosing people has increased, the number of people labeled has also increased. Diagnosing and treating normal life problems as illnesses isn't due to any disease, but instead due to a pernicious social trend. And then, as Sara writes, once someone is labeled as "mentally ill" they are harassed with psychotherapy that causes anger and lack of personal responsibility and/or empathy or compassion, and drugs that release inhibitions against violent behavior. The treatment causes the problems it purports to be designed to prevent, sort of like a diet milk shake that causes obesity.

Great plan. And NPR, National Pharmaceutical Radio, has a trendy, hip piece like this. Wonder which big pharma co underwrote the story.

Yeah, Sally and Sara... I went to college 10 years ago (holy crap, I'm old) and still live in my college town, and trust me, the kids today are not any crazier than we were... the idea is obscene.

Psychiatry reminds me a bit of that old Charlie Chaplin movie... where he goes around breaking people's windows and then peddles his services door-to-door as a "window-fixer"...

I could only get through 5 minutes of the audio.

The nature of student stress hasn't really changed, but the definitions and widening parameters of the "mental illness" meme via the DSM sure have. The fact that NPR journalists can't see this, or aren't even prepared to question their own outlandish presuppositions, and at least attempt to appear balanced, is rather astounding.

The other important factor that must be considered is the epidemic abuse of psychotropics and pharmaceuticals now, compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Generation-Y, or the ADHD-Generation, has been given one cocktail after another since age 2-to-10, and eventually they graduate to pediatric bipolar, then adult depression, OCD, anxiety disorder, bipolar-I, bilpolar-II, bipolar-III (have we hit a fourth yet?) or all of the above.

Mental illness is increasingly becoming the norm; it's almost fashionable for angst-ridden youth to be "clinically depressed." Those who don't enjoy this status increasingly feel left out. The illicit drug of choice on campus is no longer the sacred herb, but Ritalin.

If there is a change in the nature of on-campus stress these days, and I'm prepared to entertain that there may be, it is almost entirely drug-related and involves years of stigma of kids born after 1970. It has absolutely nothing do do with what the reporters and interviewees matter-of-factly repeat as 'mental illness.'