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Why are we seeing more and more men (and boys) that are so disregulated that they need medication and support?
I think in the past few hundred years, there have long been plenty of men who should have had medication and support but they became homeless or drunks or serial killers or abusive husbands and people turned the other way.
Then there was a brief period where we institutionalized men like that, but it was short lived.
Now, I can’t speak for the UK, but in the US, it’s almost impossible to get any kind of help or community support for parents, and as a result, parents are stretched super thin, and the places where people used to gather, like church or the local skateboard park or community centers, are empty, and both kids and adults alike are attached to cell phones all day long, and kids aren’t getting human connection from anywhere. Not to mention that so many of the medications they put kids on have violent tendencies as side effects.
So I don’t think it’s more, as much as it’s more visible.
Now, I can’t speak for the UK, but in the US, it’s almost impossible to get any kind of help or community support for parents, and as a result, parents are stretched super thin,
As a parent, this is so true. The shit economy means that parents have to work long hours just to scrape by. So they're too exhausted to spend quality time with their kids (and there's just no time to do stuff together). And the American cultural expectation is that parents (mainly mothers) are lazy if they ask for help for literally anything. Combine that with the issues of social media and the loss of IRL human connection, and its no wonder kids are so messed up
There’s also the demand that women have more kids paired with the outrage at being expected to help with a kid that isn’t biologically yours. Both almost exclusively male phenomena.
church or skateboard park or community center…are empty
Do you have any evidence for this? I live in a fairly woke place and the churches are everywhere and active at least, and last time I went past a skate park it was crawling with kids.
The skateboard parks are my own observation, but I am not going to share what region I live in. Suffice it to say that I’ve lived in multiple places around the US and also multiple countries and I’ve never seen so few kids out on the street or in public places as I do now, particularly since the pandemic, but I am very glad you are seeing something different.
As for church attendance, that’s documented in many places.
Gallup poll from 2024: https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
Here’s a regional map (also 2024): https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/church-religious-services-american-attendance-drop
Here’s statistics on overall decline in use of community spaces, including parks and libraries, with an emphasis on divide between class and rural/urban: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/disconnected-places-and-spaces/
Environmental toxins, libertine attitudes and embrace of hedonism, aversion to imposing consequences on smaller transgressions so they escalate, social media cranking up personality disorders to 11, lack of male role models in the home and media, any number of issues.
There are people who genuinely cannot function and likely should be in an adult assisted living facility. I know and understand that.
But there are many, many younger people these days who could function but do not try, and they're allowed to not try because of the belief that they are incapable of anything. It's easier to say that you can't do anything because things are harder - I know this well because I have severe OCD and sensory issues that cause me a lot of pain. Things that should be easy are ridiculously fucking hard for me. It sucks. I have a friend with her own struggles that make life challenging and "to be endured".
Neither of us have ever really had an option of just not trying to get and keep a job. It's just out of the question regardless of how hard it is to manage. If you give up on yourself you eviscerate any potential resilience. You hate yourself. You hate others. There's a whole swath of young people who seem to have totally given up on themselves, and as a society we seem to be agreeing with them that there's no point in giving them responsibility because they can't handle it. I find it really tragic, and it doesn't bode well for us collectively. These people are unstable.
Too many male role models in the home and media, you mean. And at school. These guys are learning this behavior from other men and boys. Men ARE role models, just terrible ones. The solution is to have none. The pursuit of “good ones” is not only fruitless but reinforces the notion that boys cannot look up to women as role models.
My husband is probably a Nigel because his dad was gone a lot for work and he was effectively raised by a mother and a badass older sister.
You know, it's interesting that you say that. Last weekend I went out shopping to Big box stores. I normally don't but I'm trying to avoid Amazon. Every store, breakfast feeling absolutely dead, was staffed by young men. Young, greasy, dirty guys with almost no customer service skills. Like an army of failure to launches.
And nearly no young women bc they are probably in college handling their business.
The difference was striking.
It’s so obvious that this many men were not supposed to be here. Most of them are not doing much at BEST, and more typically causing some level of harm to the women around them.
In the past, society had a sink or swim attitude. As other posters noted, they ended up as vagrants or in prison or the mental institutions of the time called insane asylums. No doubt some families tried to take care of them, & suffered violence from them as a result. But if they were violent & anti-social they probably wound up in prison for years.
Even today, a lot of them become vagrants. In my area, whenever a vagrant with ties to the local community makes the news, he often has family in the area who had little choice but leave him on the street.
The optimist in me wants to believe they already existed, it's just that there's finally more awareness
Hate to be that person but is it just men? A LOT of women these days are seriously mentally ill
Society has changed in the last few decades, life used to be harder. Working class boys would have left school at 14 and gone to work if they could find it, or turned to crime. Up until quite recently there were boys homes, Borstals and the army for boys who had no other resources or couldn't fit in. Before Borstals, boys were put into prisons with adult men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borstal
It also used to be normal for an army of tramps - mostly men - to walk around the country from one workhouse to another, they were banned from, staying in the same place, and they lived on hand outs. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tramp/
These men don’t want to be alive and they take out their anger on the person who gave them life. It makes sense in a really tragic way.
Bring back institutionalization.
This! People need a safe option for when a loved one is in mental health crisis.