Emotional wellbeing

I was watching a presentation on YouTube today that brushed on the topic of child mortality and the correlation with GDP and the results were fairly comforting; in the past four decades the child mortality has decreased and the gap between the western countries and third world countries has been steadily decreasing. And I guess it's easy to extrapolate that overall people are living much longer and more healthy than before. This can be seen in the sense that there are movements away from trash food and towards healthier foods and the rapid growth of the wellness/fitness business.

But this lead me to wonder about the overall state of us. This is nothing new but recently I've been hearing lots of stories and witnessing some first hand cases of situations where people feel really bad. The Jokela massacre last week, I believe, was mostly motivated by the bad feelings and anxiety and other psychological issues than from any political ideology, regardless of what the perpetrator stated in his writings. I guess now that we're not dying as much as before, we're becoming worse off in the scale of psychological and emotional wellness. More people are feeling really bad. Which is interesting, becuase by all meters we're wealthier and better off than ever before. And this, again, is nothing new. But it's an interesting phenomenon regardless. And raises interesting questions as to what is causing this and how could this be solved. Even though school shootings might still be considered black swan events (i.e. very unlikely to happen), the problem still manifests itself in many smaller ways.

At work I heard today of a case where a youngster had tried to kill herself. And this was supposedly already the second time. And incidents like these aren't very rare as I've heard of quite many similar ones from just a rather small circle of people. Overall I'm wondering what's the reason behind this sort of behaviour, especially when it comes to younger people. I personally can't really offer an explanation asides from the so typical answers of "the pressure that society places on young people these days through increased cut throat competition" and so on. But I'm not entirely convinced that that's a valid answer. It's too vague. I will, however, admit that the above may play some smaller role as I as a young person will also agree that on some level competition is quite fierce in the academia and work environments. But it still hasn't made me think of giving up my life or harming myself or others in any way. On the contrary, actually. Right now I'm very enthusiastic about some aspects of the world. I'm enjoying my studies and my work even though I have to give quite a lot of energy to be able to handle them to a satisfactory extent. Of course everyone comes across a multitude of problems and issues along their journey, but why do people resort to extremes instead of just trying to find a solution to the problems. Every problem has a solution and even if the solution is so difficult that it can't be found, most problems can be circumvented one way or the other. It just seems that instead of stopping and drawing breath when confronted with a problem, people instead do rash and hasty decisions and just cause more problems. And that's a shame.