Anyone who has anything to do with parenting, teaching, pastoring or working with this age group will agree that anxiety levels and mental illness have increased markedly over the last two decades.
The usual culprit behind this epidemic is social media and the development of our young people living their lives on a screen. Addiction to mobile phones means we do have a problem on our hands.
A prohibition of social media for children under the age of 16 is gaining support both here and in Australia.
But what if mobile phones and social media are only a symptom of a deeper problem?
It is important to note that anxiety was on the increase in Western cultures well before smart phones and social media were around. Writing in 1996, Edwin Friedman described the West as being "chronically anxious".
I’m not sure if New Zealand was chronically anxious then but we sure are now, and the mental health wards within our hospitals and the survey statistics support this claim.
So, what lies beneath this growing sickness? As a follower of Jesus who takes the Bible seriously, I can say that the tendency to worry, be anxious and to experience mental sickness is not something new to our age.
The wonderful promise of Jesus, that I find profoundly liberating and encouraging, is his invitation to come to him to find peace. The apostle Paul also has some profound medicine recorded in scripture for the people of faith who struggle with questions of anxiety.
Having walked closely alongside people who have experienced debilitating proportions of mental illness I don’t want to be flippant in prescribing a remedy for a complex sickness that would guarantee healing.
But I do want to highlight that this problem of mental illness is not primarily a problem of individuals but rather a society that has lost its way. I also want to offer hope for those who find themselves in the grip of such illness.
I have seen first-hand how God can bring freedom to the mind and as Jesus puts it: "rest for your soul". To experience rest for your soul does of course first require a belief in that soul, and also the one offering that rest.
And this might be the first clue to diagnosing why we have become so chronically unwell.
Western culture for at least 200 years has told us a number of lies: the individual person is at the centre of the universe, we have no transcendent purpose or meaning, we can get along just fine without God.
These assertions contradict the biblical witness and conspire to place a crushing weight of responsibility upon us without any sense of hope for the human soul.
A nation, a culture or a person who embraces these lies, can easily succumb to mental and spiritual illness and while our young people might be struggling the most, anxiety, depression and God forbid, suicide can confront any one at any age in the culture we currently inhabit.
The invitation of Jesus is to think again about the life we are living. To lay down the burden we are carrying and to invite him to carry some of that heavy, heavy load.
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Matthew 11:28-29.
What a glorious invitation.
Our culture’s default process for treating mental illness is drugs and therapy. Prescription or illicit drugs are distributed with reckless abandon.
Counsellors and therapists and helplines are stretched to breaking point. Millions of dollars are directed at the problem ($1.9 billion in the 2019 Budget) but the problem gets worse every year.
What if our sickness at its core is actually a spiritual problem rather than simply a chemical or cognitive issue? What if the anxiety we feel is born of our alienation from the one who created us, who loves us, who died for us at Calvary 2000 years ago but who conquered death so that we might live — I mean really live.
Significantly the first thing Jesus offered to his followers after returning from the dead was his peace.
If you find yourself reading this and thinking "yes I know there is something off in my mind and my soul", if anxiety has become your normal, then Jesus’ invitation is for you.
"Come to me all who are weary ... and you will find rest for your souls".
• Rev Stu Crosson is Senior Minister at Hope Church, Dunedin.
