It has been officially announced that 59% of young people in Spain have some form of mental health problem. This is more than double what she had in 2017. What went wrong? Jorge Luis Ortiz explores the horizon.
New laws are coming. In mid-January, Spain’s lower house of parliament received a proposal on mental health. This is not surprising, since all indicators show that mental disorders have significantly worsened in recent years.
In October, the private foundation FAD Juventud announced that 59% of young people admitted to having some kind of mental health problem (compared to 28% in 2017). Additionally, one in three of her young girlfriends admitted to taking psychotropic drugs, half of them without a prescription. According to UNICEF, 15 percent of young people in Spain show symptoms of severe depression. The percentage of young people who have considered suicide is as high as 11%.
These data are staggering. It is welcome that public authorities are paying attention to this. But it is worth asking whether that is enough.
Please let me explain. For example, unlike autism (which I call a modern disease with three NO’s: no cause, no treatment, no hope of cure), unless we address what caused the disease, It won’t.
So let’s briefly review some of the contributing factors to this huge problem in youth.
Lockdown due to new coronavirus infection
First, we must discuss the most immediate cause: the massive coronavirus lockdown. Spain has imposed Europe’s strictest lockdown, with household incomes falling four times as much as the rest of the European Union.
According to official data, anxiety and depression among young people in Spain increased by 32% in 2020 when the lockdown was implemented. It would certainly have been poorly thought out by lockdown proponents to order the suspension of social life and keep people strictly confined to their homes for months on end. But then they were allowed to leave their homes, with the mandatory requirement to always wear a face covering and take a so-called vaccine.
When will Spanish politicians admit and apologize for the harm they have caused young people? It would be wise to do so in order to resist the temptation to lock us up again. I’m not entirely sure if they learned all these lessons.
bullying
Other causes include bullying at school. It is of paramount importance for young people to feel valued and integrated by their peers. According to a study by the Complutense University of Madrid, in Spain there are 220,000 students who are victims of bullying and 74,000 bullies. These figures are for November 2023, while a student at a high school in Andalusia was admitted to the ICU after being assaulted by three other classmates.
What is the source of such devastating data on bullying? The simple answer is the loss of authority in schools. This is something that teachers themselves are dissatisfied with. In keeping with the times, schools have ceased to promote and defend discipline and moral values beyond the friendly coexistence of students and teachers as democratic practice and learning. When those in authority abandon the principle of authority, the result, in school and school life, is usually the law of the strong, whose secondary companions are often also the cruelest. This is the law of life.
drug abuse
But there are more distant and deeper causes. I previously wrote that a third of adolescents in Spain have used cannabis in the past month. Almost 20% consider themselves compulsive users.
Also, the percentage of young people aged 16 to 18 who have had full sexual intercourse is 50 percent. The average age of first sexual intercourse has dropped to 13.8 years. Meanwhile, Spain leads the world in the proportion of young people who declare themselves to be LGBTI (14%).
Spain is also one of the most tolerant countries when it comes to gender transition for teenagers, thanks to the Trans Law passed in January 2023. Even Spain’s progressive press has begun to report on the psychological problems of people who have changed their gender.
The majority are extramarital
But that’s not all. According to data released in November 2023, most children are now born out of wedlock. Divorce has decreased slightly in recent years. But today’s children and adolescents are the children of 2005’s “sudden divorce.” This has led to Spain having one of the highest divorce rates in the world.
Many children and young people are growing up without a father. Therefore, there is no male figure of protection, security, and authority.
What else could be worse? Spain is not particularly prone to Murphy’s Law. That’s because the decisions made over the past 40 years to fundamentally change our country’s culture and way of being are beginning to bear fruit.
In fact, the Bible teaches that all who are not in Christ are dead in sin and sin (Ephesians 2:1-3). But all these characteristics that we alluded to did not exist in Spain, where I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic child in a Roman Catholic country. The aim was to abolish traditional Spain, which was definitely a Roman Catholic culture but was still an expression of Christianity.
And now we are completely immersed in the world of paganism. The only thing that is certain to young people is the prospect of despair and failure. It goes without saying that for most college students, there is a solid prospect of emigrating because they can’t find a job that pays enough to support their entire family…but anyway, what happened to the family to support? Is not it?
The price to pay was too high. The sacrifices made by the younger generation are too great. The historical, social, and cultural experiment of the past two generations has come to an end.
But there is still hope. We hope for true spiritual rebirth based on the Bible, and the reform and restoration of Christianity and the church in this era.