What we search and write about says so much

’Tis the season for media behemoths and search-engine companies to release lists.

Bestselling books, most downloaded songs, popular words — if you can count it during the year, you can send it out as a press release in December.

Google joined this parade of quantifiability this week with a video recap, “The Year in Search 2021.” It opened with the unsurprising observation that users searched “how to heal” more often this year than in the past.

I say “unsurprising” because if you’ve been paying attention to the people around you, you’ve noticed more of them than usual are hurting.

The media has been awash in coverage of mental health in the last few months. Tales of people coping or failing to cope. The stressors of a pandemic and financial uncertainty. Anxieties about going back to in-person jobs or school.

But I don’t need Google or the evening news to tell me this. All I need to do is count research papers.

An assignment that produces more than its share of angst each semester has recently inspired an overabundance of essays about mental health. I’ve seen it with my students in both high school and college. At least a third of the 100 or so papers I’ve read this month deal with some aspect of anxiety or depression.

The most popular single subject has been social media’s effect on mental health. This is not surprising given the Facebook/Instagram whistleblowing earlier this year, happening just as students were selecting topics. But I’ve also read essays with other mental health focuses: PTSD and veterans, therapy animals, the effect of money on happiness, relationship failure, and how parents’ decision to spank or not to spank affects their children.

While none of these topics are necessarily new, the approach has changed. Fewer papers dwell solely on the causes of stress or anxiety, while more time and space is allotted to recovery. This change in emphasis is saddening in one respect — the societal equivalent of saying “hey, stuff happens” — but hopeful in another, a recognition that no situation is so intractable that it can’t be improved.

This semester’s emphasis on mental health topics could be a chicken-or-egg scenario, I suppose. Is mental health top of mind because it’s covered so often by the media, which then influences students’ papers? Or is all that media coverage a reflection of boots-on-the-ground reality, which is also manifested in my students’ topics?

The truth is probably somewhere between. Still, it is hard to deny changes in the scope of the mental health problem. The non-profit Mental Health America notes that suicidal ideation was on the rise in 2021, and that “the percentage of adults with a mental illness who report unmet need for treatment has increased every year since 2011.”

Additionally, the New York Times recently reported a 30-percent increase in American overdose deaths, which topped 100,000 from May 2020 to April 2021, a grim milestone. The figure, the paper notes, is “more than the toll of car crashes and gun fatalities combined.”

It is often said that suicides increase near the holidays, but this is not accurate. Suicide attempts decrease at Christmastime and peak in the summer months. Still, the warning signs should never be overlooked.

If anything, this extra focus on mental health — in students, the media and the larger society — is welcome, whatever the origins. The more people talk about it, the more people normalize it, decreasing a stigma that contributes to far too many people avoiding treatment.

Which is a tragedy waiting to happen in any season.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.