The original article including the research is here.
The article at Skeptic focuses on the worrisome and inaccurate things that have been told to succeeding generations about poverty/inequality, climate danger, and threats to democracy. They make a pretty good case that succeeding generations believe worse things about the country and the world, making their anxiety and depression about it more reasonable. I concur with a lot of this and don't want to supplant it.
However I do want to add to it, and clarify this a bit. Note first the wording, especially the terms "challenges" and "identity." The former suggests something ongoing, and the latter is a phrasing that Boomers would be less likely to use, though they have the concept. The identity of the young is more tied to who they think they are. Older people are more likely to point to what they have done. I am outgoing...I'm ambitious...I'm something of an idealist Versus I'm a mother of three...I'm a teacher...I'm a joiner. That may account for at least some of the difference. The numbers may not just be the difference between generations, but something that happens naturally with age. Boomers might, if you asked them, acknowledge having had mental health challenges that they called by a different name when they were young, but consider that past and no longer a big deal. Stories like "When we first moved to a tiny apartment in Peoria and I was at home with two toddlers..." or "When I got back from Vietnam I wasn't in good shape..." might suggest what I mean there. We didn't call that a mental health challenge then.
The generations are made of the same stuff genetically. We have had different experiences, but they have more similarity than not. To find this much variation in one direction along an important axis tells me that some other things must be being measured. Fear? It is a staple of 60s panic that children had drills to take cover under their desks in case of nuclear attack. You might get drafted and sent to war. The percentage in poverty wasn't that different 60 years ago, but we were much closer to parents and especially grandparents who had experienced serious poverty. The possibility of "not succeeding" meant hunger, not embarrassment. There were more diseases and accidents that would kill you young or middle aged.
I am also seeing some definitional problems between how we would have explained things then and what we call them now. Mentally ill was not the usual term, and mental health was even less common. Worried and anxious are similar concepts but force us to speak about them differently. This is true for sad, blue, or depressed as well.
Finally, we are being shown only a portion of the full graph. We are seeing the middle 50% of it, with 25% truncated off each end, making it look more dramatic. That 27% of Boomer males that endorsed having a mental health challenge likely had more serious issues - like a disability or serious prejudice - to get anyone to even notice. Teachers, youth pastors, online polls, and doctors offices actively ask you how you are doing on specific topics. So do parents, who have a readier vocabulary of psych terms now. I had a dozen symptoms of anxiety* as a child, but no one ever asked me if I was anxious. I can now recognise post hoc something of how this affected me and how I responded, but would I say that a mental health challenge is a part of my identity? It probably depends on how the question is asked and what led up to it.
Yet suppose that my correctives only explain half the variation, and the above graph tells us something real about attitudes. In addition to genetics, I also believe in incentives. The graph tells us that men get less attention for emotional or adaptation issues than women, and everyone gets more attention for them now than we did then. Is that a good thing? Dunno. A clever person could make an argument either way, and most would say it is mixed but lean in one direction. We don't want real problems to be ignored but we don't want overattention to create problems that aren't there.
Let me offer an additional possibility. Giving something a name creates more permanence. We experience depression or anxiety differently if we believe it is temporary, tied to our unemployment or a breakup, than if we believe it is something we are prone to, or even are.
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