While it is true that we are presently struggling as societies with an apparent epidemic of anxiety and similar emotional problems, the truth is, people have always had such issues and in such volumes.
What's different now is that because we have made significant inroads in understanding and teaching the kind of emotional self-control that in the past was the reserve of a highly specialised social clique, those who were very old and mature, and a few others who happened to naturally encounter the haphazard co-incidences of pressures that teach such control, psychologists and society at large has acquired a new faith in the malleability of the personality for the better and the potential for everyone (or nearly everyone) to can acquire these wonderful emotional skills quickly.
Therefore anyone who doesn't have such emotional skills, college students included, can now be classed as abnormal and requiring treatment, whereas 60 years ago that was just the natural maturity level of their character for that age.
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Date: 2/2/11 07:27 (UTC)While it is true that we are presently struggling as societies with an apparent epidemic of anxiety and similar emotional problems, the truth is, people have always had such issues and in such volumes.
What's different now is that because we have made significant inroads in understanding and teaching the kind of emotional self-control that in the past was the reserve of a highly specialised social clique, those who were very old and mature, and a few others who happened to naturally encounter the haphazard co-incidences of pressures that teach such control, psychologists and society at large has acquired a new faith in the malleability of the personality for the better and the potential for everyone (or nearly everyone) to can acquire these wonderful emotional skills quickly.
Therefore anyone who doesn't have such emotional skills, college students included, can now be classed as abnormal and requiring treatment, whereas 60 years ago that was just the natural maturity level of their character for that age.