Naah dude it's bad. I've walked among that crowd and I would describe them as "bottled up." I graduated with 230 people. That number would have been 233 if guns, pills and razor blades weren't available so my high school experience was apparently about 130 times more aggro than the norm these days but things are definitely different out there. The kids I've interacted with do not handle crisis the same way I did or my friends did. They handle crisis the way the ones you worried about offing themselves did. We kinda thought we had this. Turns out we don't. It's worth figuring out why.Let me stress that teen suicide deaths are still rare; just 10 out of 100,000 teens ages 15 through 19 die this way.
TODAY our CEO sent an email out to the whole company, talking about the opioid crisis. His kids have lost 3 friends this week, due to fentanyl-laced oxy. Probably not suicides. Probably. (He's a typical high-level tech exec, with that lifestyle, family, and ... he always thought opioids were "other people's" problems. Not in his circle. Not even close. He was shocked into reality, basically. And he's not a dumb clueless guy, either.) We have close to 500 people in the company, across 5 locations all over the USA... west, midwest, south, northeast... and he sent it to everyone. Kids are way more casual about drugs today, than in my day. And apparently suicide, as well. I've learned a lot, today.
Opioids are nasty because your happy zone between "feels good" and "dead" shifts radically over time. Not only that, but your choice of oxycodone, hydrocodone, heroin or fentanyl hits that zone differently. Not only that, but the pricing of oxycodone, hydrocodone, heroin or fentanyl is highly subject to availability and, in the case of the latter two, purity. So you broke your arm and ended up on Oxy and you kept getting Oxy and now you need more Oxy and it took five refills before your doctor decided maybe this was a problem. You might go through two or three more doctors before you can't see a doctor who will hook you up with Oxy. So now you can't get Oxy, which has a known dose, but you can get heroin, which if you find the right dealer has a known dose, but if that dealer gets snatched you need to find a new dealer and if you take your old dose from your new dealer and your new dealer is cutting his shit with fentanyl, you're dead. Or you were on Oxy but you switched to heroin because you couldn't get Oxy anymore and now you're trying so hard to get clean but you had a rough week and you just need a hit and you've been off for a few months so maybe you should try half a dose but you can't feel it so you top off with another half dose and now you're dead. My sister has a friend who has been on a maintenance dose of heroin for 30 years. She shoots enough heroin to keep her out of withdrawals but not so much that it makes her high. She's relapsed enough to know that she's a lifetime addict and that's just how she's living. She's got four kids. I dated one of her friends that tried to get clean in '96 but couldn't get clean enough and the relapse overdosed her. The end. Fuckin' sophomore in college. You don't think Judy's life-long habit was influenced by Jane's choices? In your day, drugs were safe. The purity of street weed in the United States right now is higher than the purity of hash was in the '80s. You grew up with poppers and quaaludes if I'm not mistaken. Sure there was speed but it was mostly dextroamphetamine, not methamphetamine. I don't think kids are more casual, I think that the available street narcotics will fucking kill you far more easily. I also think that getting drunk at a party wasn't the end of the world back in the '80s whereas now, you have a blood alcohol level other than 0.000 while operating a car and you're facing mandatory jail time. We've backed kids into a corner and given them no way out. They're dying as a result. me and my friends smoked some weed and occasionally dropped acid. Cocaine was hard to come by. Me and my friends' younger siblings had meth, heroin and crack but DARE had made booze unthinkable. It's fucking stupid.
"Localized" is exactly the problem because it sets your norms. For us, drunk drivers and suicide were our principle problems. It lowers the quality of life to the point where you're willing to risk more because you have less to lose. It took me 20 years to figure out that whatimmagonnado is spend an absurd amount of my time reaching out to young kids over the internet that are hurting and afraid and alone not because I have any native compassion but because it's one of the few things that quiets the bleak, lonely teenager I'm not anymore. Especially when I talk to them and recognize that they're so much worse-equipped to deal with the isolation than my generation was.