Ok I have had enough of the knee jerk reaction comments here let me tell you a little story about myself .
I am 22 I am pretty much part of this generation that has the higher mental illness rate and I believe every fucking word of it. The environment kids have to go to everyday is truly depressing you have enormous amounts of social pressure to conform, I know because I was different and payed for it in the form of social death. I moved to where I live now when I was 7 I moved from an all Italian neighborhood where I couldn't walk 5 feet without bumping in to a friend/family member to a northeast suburb where I could walk a mile without meeting anyone my own age and when I went to my new school I met with a hugely different environment in which no matter how hard I tried to make friends no one wanted to be mine because I had an imagination and was therefore "weird". So now I am about 9 to 10 years old with no friends because if you talked to me you were "uncool" (which is the end all be all in this place) wondering why this is all happening and that's when I start feeling angry, not just "pissed in my cheerios" angry but extreme uncontrollable rage angry, naturally my grade's started falling and my teachers noticed I wasn't doing my homework anymore and if they tried to talk to me about it it wouldn't even seem like I was listening because I wasn't. School transformed for me it became a place of daily torture that was to be endured because I "had to go" and there was no fucking way I was taking it home with me in the form of homework or school projects. around the 6th and 7th grade my parents were seeing a trend in me the whole not doing homework and increased outbursts at school weren't going away so my parents decide to take my to a psychologist fast forward about 2 years and 3 suicide attempts later and im getting out of grade school getting ready to enter highschool working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for no pay (we had a kitchen were running at a local pool club that wasn't bringing in any money) at this point I am "cured" and I say "cured" because you never really are truly cured of the injuries I received you just learn how to cope with it. I go into highschool have a great time and for the first time in a very long time I was happy (straight A's btw for all of those who like to call the kids of this generation lazy/stupid) , but when I got to college I encountered a highly social environment but I found myself unable to get close enough to anyone to be friends or more because I still had an irrational fear of people from when I was in grade school so I drop out after the first semester and go into a deep depression and start seeing my psychologist again fast forward about another three years and that brings us to present day where I have had a few jobs (all of which have terrible pay and no benefits) am once again "cured", doing the best I can and looking for a girl who understands me ( I met one quite by accident but due to a truly tragic set of circumstances I didnt have chance to date her but that's another sad story) and I am once again approaching that state we all call Happiness.
Thats where the story ends for now but its not over I still have to carry with me the scars I received as a child I have few friends but I keep close those that I have, I have fallen in love and been heartbroken(which btw was worse than any other emotional pain I have experienced before). I am the nicest guy in the world these days I am friendly but quiet and will help anyone out with almost anything they ask of me, which is needless to say a far cry from what I once was.
Every now and then I'll see specials on TV trying to get to the root cause of why these kids going into schools and public places with assault rifles and explosives and I laugh because I know EXACTLY why they do it, and when you get lucky and get a guy or girl that doesn't shoot themselves at the end and people ask them why they did it, the response is invariably either an vicious insult or a "I had to do it" but no one understands. Yes they HAD to do it because they couldn't take the pain any more the question you SHOULD be asking is what caused the pain if you can answer that question and solve the problem it points to then I think you would see a big reduction in events like this. I really sympathize with the gunners too because the only difference between them and me is that I had two exceptional parents that were smart enough to do something before I went ballistic. Literally.
Also I just want to add that I talked about this all very extensively with my 93 year old grand father (born 1916) a few years ago he knew about my school saga and we compared stories about growing up during the depression and my own growing up story one main difference we kept hitting on though is that, you can grow/steal more food, you can search for a job, and you can throw together some shelter out of nothing more than trash but you can never FORCE somebody to be your friend/talk to you even if you put a gun in their face and THAT is what makes today's schools so terrible and IMHO makes the increases in mental illnesses we see today.
TL;DR Fuck all you who believe today's kids are weak/lazy/cry babies they are the same kids as ever just put in far more insidious circumstances and you better hope you and YOUR kids aren't around when some poor overwrought fool decides they have had enough. Have some compassion assholes. /rant
