I am living in an extraordinary generation. Although “youthfulness” once meant vigor, hope, and excitement, my young generation is overwhelmingly depressed, cynical, lacking hope. This is a real problem, not a simply imagined one, as evidenced by increasing rates of suicide. This is leading many to ask “What's happening to our kids?”

I don't have an answer, but I do have theories and anecdotes. I myself struggled with depression for a good part of my life. I do not consider myself or my experience to be “normal”, but I exist in the same social climate as others, and I am more “in touch” with people my own age.

One of the pitfalls people who are curious about depression have is to assume that depression is merely a normal emotional state. That is, although it is certainly not normal to be sad all of the time, a depressed person is simply a person that always has a legitimate reason to be sad. This is not the case, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was.

Clinical depression is somewhat well understood to be caused by an imbalance of chemicals, specifically serotonin. The main problem in depression, as far as I understand it, is that serotonin is being absorbed too quickly by the brain ¹⁾. Serotonin is a “happy chemical”, although it responds to different stimuli than it's more well known cousin, dopamine. I see it described as a mood stabilizer that prevents any of the other moods from getting out of hand. So, it prevents you from being in a constant state of panic at all of the many, many things that could go wrong around us at any given time, for example.

Something doesn't add up with these three, apparently true, facts:

• Rates of depression are going up
• Depression is a chemical disorder, and, therefore, genetic
• There have been no major genetic changes in the population

So, if it's a genetic condition, and rates of it are going up, but our genes aren't changing. What the heck is going on? Well, like all apparent contradictions in the world, the devil is in the details. There are a few possible explanations.

One theory is that nothing is actually changing in the population. What is actually changing is the testing criteria. Similar to the apparent increase of autism, it may be that we are now better at spotting signs of the disorder.