Hmm that’s a tough question to answer. I think that mental health is like physical health - people die from cancer, heart failure, etc. You never know what’s going on in someone’s mind to cause them to take their own lives. Unfortunately, we have a lot of armchair experts (mostly the older generation) that may say that mental health conditions weren’t there in their time. Guess what, neither was the covid pandemic, and the different strains of diseases that crop up every day.

We are also living in the age of social media as someone else mentioned. I don’t think we’ve really had time to develop our identities separately from others because we joined it so early. We compare our bodies, our homes, our clothes and our finances with those of others, even though it may be subconscious. There are bound to be negative effects of growing up like that. Our parents joined social media when they were well past their teens.

When you combine social media with the pressure that may come from parents to succeed (be it doing well in school, a first-class degree, that coveted graduate position etc), it’s a recipe for disaster in my opinion.