anxiety

It’s been widely reported in the news that depression, anxiety, and suicidality among youth are on the rise. As a humane educator who teaches about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection, I’ve personally seen anxiety deepen among youth during the almost 40 years that I’ve been teaching.

When I began my work as a humane educator, and during the ensuing 20-plus years, by and large young people were upset about the problems they learned about, but they almost all believed these problems could be solved. In 2012, before the COVID pandemic, before wildfires were regularly destroying forests and communities across the globe, before hard-won rights were being rolled back, and before polarization had become so extreme it seemed we could barely come together to solve much of anything, I was invited to speak at a middle school in Connecticut. I asked the fifth- and sixth-graders to tell me what they thought were the biggest problems in the world, and I wrote down what they said on a whiteboard until the board was completely full. Then, I asked the students to raise their hands if they thought we could solve the problems they listed. Of the 45 children, only five raised their hands.