Something’s Gone Terribly Wrong
By Tom Gilbreath
The people of the United States — especially the young — now reel under the strain of a stunning mental health crisis. According to WebMD, persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness among high schoolers rose 49 percent from 2011 to 2021. And it gets worse as they get older. According to a Harvard study, “Young adults in the US report twice the rates of anxiety and depression as teens.”
Shouldn’t we ask why? Shouldn’t we ask if we’re doing something wrong? What did we change that we should not have changed? We lament school shootings. People talk about gun control or better mental health care as the answer. But shouldn’t we ask what changed to precipitate this mental health crisis? It’s obvious that a change has taken place. Something has gone very wrong.
It’s not uncommon today for 35-year-old men to spend the majority of their time — not sleeping or working, not fishing or hunting, not joking and having fun with friends. Instead of those healthy activities, they choose to close themselves away in make-believe, videogame universes. They spend real money on things with no real worth. They spend their lives going “after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty” (1 Samuel 12:21, ESV).
I’m not talking about occasionally playing videogames with friends, or playing an occasional on-line game. I’m talking about people who escape to videogame-land and never return. Others escape reality through drugs and drink. They cheat themselves out of the vibrant life God offers them. In these and in hundreds of other ways, our society encourages the degradation of human existence. No wonder our people are unhappy, depressed, and disoriented.
Isn’t it time for all of us to ask where we went wrong, and what we can change to again raise mentally healthy individuals?
I don’t mean to suggest that this nation was ever anywhere near perfect. Manifestations of various mental illnesses have always been part of American life, just as in other countries. But clearly, something has changed. The change itself is frightening and disorienting, often resulting in anger, and in that way adding to the problem.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. We could blame politicians, building their power bases by splitting us up into offended groups. We could blame educators for stoking a similar kind of paranoia. We could blame the entertainment industries or just big business in general.
We could even blame the Church. Many congregations have wholly abandoned the Gospel. Others still preach God’s Word, but live as if they don’t believe it. Despite this, if you remain a committed, Bible-believing Christian, don’t be discouraged. You are not alone. God has reserved for Himself a powerful remnant who “have not bowed the knee to Baal.”
Many are convinced that with new leadership, a beautiful change is coming to America. I hope so. But the kind of change we need will involve more than lip service to God. It will mean sorrow for our sins. It will mean humility before God. Romans 11:25 speaks of people who have become wise in their own conceits. To turn this nation around, we must abandon those conceits.
As a people, America “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25, NKJV). Therefore, as a people, we must repent, reform, and return — not return to an imagined American past — but return to reverence and love for the God from Whom all freedom flows.
