It's true that young adulthood can be a turbulent time — for folks from any generation, Prinstein says. So young people are more likely than older adults to say they experienced a depressive episode in the past year.
But we can't really compare how depressed millennials are with how it was for our parents and grandparents when they were young. That's because researchers weren't very good at collecting data on mental illness back in the '60s and '70s, when the baby boomers were in their late teens and 20s. The federal government does have data going back to the early 2000s, and depression rates haven't increased since then.
There are better stats on suicide among young people. Suicide rates for young adults increased through the '70s and '80s, but started dropping off in the late '90s and have continued to decrease. So, it seems young people these days don't have higher rates of suicide than generations past.
So where does this idea that millennials' mental health is declining even come from? Prinstein thinks people get that impression because we milliennials are full of angst. That's not new. But unlike past generations, we like to broadcast our angst.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/10/12/446928518/is-the-resilience-of-millennials-underrated
I've been saying for quite some time that the whole Millenials are lazy and whiny thing is completely overblown and the result of selective memory and nostalgia among other things. Seems I might have some statistics backing me up...
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