Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine blamed the deterioration of teenage mental health on climate change and gun violence, during a Thursday hearing.
“Young people feeling depressed about the future, the world feeling hopeless, has many causes, but to some degree you probably feel that way because you think adults have let you down. Climate change, gun violence, couple people were killed in my hometown at a high school graduation the other day,” Kaine said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on teen mental health. “I think young people’s part of this sense of hopelessness is this feeling that adults have let us down, whether it’s on climate or guns or political polarization or kids get getting kicked around by adults for political purposes, if they’re marginalized.”
Kaine argued that today’s political challenges are analogous to the widespread political assassinations and fear of nuclear war that permeated the 1960s and 70s. (RELATED: Media Figures Make The Jackson Water Crisis All About Racism)
HAPPENING NOW: The Senate HELP committee is holding a hearing on the youth mental health crisis in America.
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— HELP Committee GOP (@GOPHELP) June 8, 2023
“I had the same feeling when I was five to 18, that the adults in the world were letting us down,” Kaine continued. “I came home from kindergarten in November 1963. I saw my mother crying for the first time in front of the television because JFK had been assassinated. I picked up the newspaper in April of 1968 and the news of MLK being assassinated and then in June of 1968 RFK being assassinated. You saw protests about the Vietnam War. You saw protests about civil rights issues. I was 16 when a president was forced to resign because of corruption. So my formative life from five to 16 was a time of chaos, war, nuclear weapons, drills in the classroom.”
Earlier in the hearing, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy blamed increased cellphone and social media use for the decline in teen mental health.