All good points, but you miss out on another reason for teen suicides, depression, and self-harm: a fairly rational belief that their generation has no future.

It's not just the climate catastrophe, though when the consensus of science is disaster it's hard to have a long term outlook.

But what are these kids going to do for a living?

They aren't all going to go into STEM, and let me tell you as a computer programmer myself that AI is going to eat most of our lunches.

Millions of Americans drive cars, busses or trucks for a living. Self-driving is not ready for prime time, but in twenty years it will be a going concern.

Amazon is working feverishly on automating all its warehouse jobs out of existence. The only reason fast food jobs aren't automating faster is that the pay is so bad that it's barely worth it.

Housing prices continue to increase all over the world due to speculation.

My first one bedroom apartment cost $235 when my girlfriend was earning $3.30 making sandwiches. That same apartment is well over $2000 today but you don't get $30 for making sandwiches.

In America, you have a crumbling political system, half of which is taken over by clinical sociopaths who vie to demonstrate their pathological indifference to the well-being of others, so if you're a person of color, a woman, queer, or friends with anyone who is, you are in a constant state of low-level fear.

That last part is mostly absent here in the Netherlands where I now live, which is why kids here seem much more like... kids, when I was a kid. American kids seemed to me to be wise beyond their years, but also weary and cynical in a dreadful way.

The Dutch word for "gay" is "homo" which is a slur in English, and it took me a while to realize that it isn't in Dutch because being gay is seen as perfectly normal by society and the government. The idea that you couldn't get reproductive health services including abortion on demand through health services covered by insurance is just alien to people here.

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America kids, are depressed and suicidal partly because of social media, but mostly because their future outlook is objectively bleak.

Give them something to look forward to, give them a reason to live, and also maybe restrict social media which is just a bad thing for society.