“I just want to die. Please leave me the fuck alone,” tweeted one of my students recently, just before the school year started again. “Somebody to talk to would be nice.”

So, has everyone always had these thoughts and we just either kept them internal or became Emily Dickinson, or has "social media" (hate the phrase) actively promoted this sort of defeatist/depressed, oversharing attitude that I used to see on facebook pretty often before I started blocking people?

We've got diaries of famous people and they reflect -- more poetically -- similar feelings on occasion, but certainly never so frivolously as what I've commonly seen on my facebook feed.