As a Millennial, I always hear about mental health and mental illness. From my friends, other Millennials, from the older generations, we talk about the importance of mental health all the time and how we need to confront and heal our internal wounds. Ironically, under the same breath, I constantly hear the banter of generations before us (even of those who are only 10 years old than me), about how Millennials are soft, lazy, and have no sense of work ethic. It’s exhausting, to be honest. It’s tiring having to defend your generation, and bring up facts and receipts (like people ask for), just to have our struggles and views turned down, belittled, and minimized. This only adds to the struggle Millennials carry when it comes to mental health.
As we close out 2018 and enter into 2019, I think it’s time that we start taking the mental health of Millennials seriously. Millennials are becoming more vocal about the mistreatment and mental abuse we’re facing and we just seem to be getting swept under the rug and ignored. Whenever Millennials voice the struggles we’re facing, we’re always deemed as dramatic and complaining, when in reality, we’re dealing with issues (and sometimes in silence) that are crippling our ability to maneuver at work, in social settings, or just society in general.
Millennials are living in a confusing time right now. We are constantly being told to achieve higher, yet generations before us aren’t giving us the opportunity to do so. Every day someone is calling us lazy and entitled, while many of us can barely make ends meet. When we do have a job, we get paid the bare minimum, we barely have health coverage, and most likely it’s not related to the area we earned our degree in.
How can we take mental health, especially in the Black community, seriously if our issues are being seen as less than?
Millennials are facing challenges that most people from older generations can’t fathom. For starters, Millennials can’t afford higher education. The cost of college is getting out of control. Millennials are the most educated, yet the most underpaid generation in history. The percentage of us living at home with our parents is on the rise.
Millennials have two or three streams of income not because we want to, but because we have to. When the only jobs we can get are those that only pay $10 per hour with no health benefits, that only leads us to buy our basic (and I do mean basic) needs of living: soap, beauty products, and clothes. If we want to move out of our parent’s home and afford the extended necessities (as I call them) in life such as a car and medical expenses, we need to think beyond society’s norm to attain the lifestyle we want and to build wealth. This is daunting and mentally draining in a time when there aren’t that many job opportunities.
Due to us being paid at such a low rate, most Millennials still depend on our parents for financial and emotional support. It can be embarrassing for some because they’ve worked so hard for so little. What’s even more daunting is when your parents, older relatives, or elders, in general, talk to Millennials about their life endeavors as if they’re doing something wrong. Many elders love to compare generational lifestyles and talk about how Millennials aren’t ready for the real world when that’s simply not true.
We are ready. We are ready to work and we want to work. We, Millennials, will not settle for less, nor will we work jobs that don’t fulfill us. We’ve watched our parents and grandparents live in the “real world,” working jobs that hate and leaving behind dreams due to financial and emotional restraints.
The problem is no one wants to talk about to root of the complications within Millennials. Elders love talking how when they were in their 20’s they could buy a house, buy a car, pay for school, etc., but somehow manage to forget the economy and job market in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s was drastically different from what it is in 2017. It’s easy to talk about all your accomplishments when you didn’t have to go through the same obstacles to achieve them. Elders can’t belittle Millennials and treat us as if we’re unsuccessful when we’re put in a position not to grow.
With all of this going on, I think it’s time that we become more understanding and no so hard on Millennials. We’re already at a disadvantage, and the added commentary and judgment doesn’t improve our situation, it adds to it. I’m pretty sure elders didn’t have their lives altogether by the time they were 25, so why is there such a demand for Millennials to be perfect? This pressure put on it affects our mental health and our opportunity to grow. Times are changing; the economy, the job market, the lifestyle, and the gender roles of the world aren’t what they used to be in the 60’s. It was easy for the elders to go to school, find a job, and have kids because they grew up in a more stable time.
Millennials are dealing with the fact we are the most vacation-deprived generation of all time, we are in the most student debt, we usually don’t know if our jobs (if we have any) will last long or if there’s any growth in the company, and it’s crazy that we live in a time when a white high school dropout can make more money than college graduates of color. We are in a position where we have to unlearn traditional gender norms, reteach older generations how their religious actions were problematic and caused trauma to us, and teach the future generation how to convey their feelings and stress in a healthy way.
Before you ask about our life, before you compare generations and why don’t we have a job or aren’t in a relationship, please understand that most Millennials are already feeling insecure about finances and life. Don’t pass judgment, lend a hand.
This article was originally posted on BlackDoctor.org.
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