This is an extraordinary figure via Kathy Shadie - Since the 1950s, teenage suicide has increased 5000% in North America.
More from Michael Coren in The Toronto Sun. in an article called "Sliding into an Abyss".
In 1958 a broad cross-section of school principals was asked what were the five most challenging problems they faced in dealing with students. The answers were as follows: Not doing homework; not respecting property, such as throwing books; leaving lights and/or doors and windows open; throwing spitballs in class; running in the halls.
In 1988 the same question was put to a similar group of teachers. This time the answers were a little different: Children having abortions; young people infected with AIDS; incidents of rape; widespread use of soft and increasingly hard drugs; a fear of murders and guns and knives in class.
I'm reading now Life at the Bottom The WorldView That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple, .
The underclass he says is a specter that is haunting the Western world. They are neither poor, by any historical standards nor are they politically oppressed, yet they live in squalid wretchedness and meaninglessness.
Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who treated the poor in a slum and at a nearby prison.
Having previously worked as a doctor in some of the poorest countries in Africa, as well as in very poor countries in the Pacific and Latin America, I have little hesitation in saying that the mental, cultural, emotional and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have encountered anywhere.
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If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look to the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.
Here is the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness and misery may be perused at leisure ---in conditions, be it remembered of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu, children having children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery, insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial step-fatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.
So what does he see as the cause? There is passivity, the unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the choices in their lives, but most of all, it's
The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism -- a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals --has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.