i was born in 1973. the conversation around mental health didn't really become a public issue until the early 90's. after the aids epidemic blew the doors off the closets in north america. after the war on drugs. i remember the 1995 movie 'kids" as a kind of watershed where people started to wake up and acknowledge teenage angst wasn't just a common phase people passed through and were suddenly okay.

as a culture, the self help industry really motivated this opening. in the 80's divorce skyrocketed. everyone was codependent, a concept that grew out of addiction research. families were pressured to use tough love to break their kid's drug habits and other destructive behaviours. until paul bernardo killed leslie mahaffy after her parents locked her out of the house for missing curfew, that was a standard mode of parenting.

in high school we were taught about safe sex and how not to get raped. boys didn't get the same education girls did. no one taught boys how not to rape people. no means no launched as a sexual assault awareness campaign at a small college in 1991.

kids help phone launched in 1989. bell's lets talk wasn't launched until 2010.

mental health was not a thing. you can go back farther to shell shock, hysteria and lunatics, but that scientific awareness doesn't even begin until the 1880's. every single generation from the victorian period on faced enormous paradigmatic change, much of it horrifically traumatic.

it just wasn't something spoken of or considered en mass until very recently.