When a video of a college student behaving erratically goes viral, the usual response is a shrug and a scroll. Andrea Widburg wants readers of American Thinker to stop and stare, because she believes the young woman in question is not an aberration but a data point.
In a September 20 essay, Widburg recounts a video posted by a Catholic black woman named Savannah, who interviews a female student on the campus of Westchester Community College, part of the State University of New York system. Widburg praises Savannah as composed and morally grounded, then describes the unnamed interviewee’s conduct in harsh terms — calling it “manic behavior and inability to think.” The exchange, she writes, ended with the student calling the police on Savannah, after which the videographer and a co-videographer were removed from campus.
One video, two different diagnoses
Widburg’s central move is to treat the clip not as an isolated spectacle but as a symptom. She pairs it with a second video, this one of a young man she describes as a “self-consciously feminized” transgender student having a meltdown over being misgendered, and argues the two share a recognizable pattern. If you are of her generation, she asks, do you remember encountering this much visible mental illness in ordinary life?
Her answer is no — and she traces the change to a cluster of cultural forces she thinks the mainstream has been too timid to name.
The first is cannabis. Widburg cites Alex Berenson’s 2019 book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, which focused on the link between heavy cannabis use and psychosis, schizophrenia and violence among people who become psychotic. She says current data back up his argument, pointing to a peer-reviewed analysis — titled Medical cannabis legalization and state-level prevalence of serious mental illness in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) 2008-2015 — which compared states by the permissiveness of their medical-marijuana laws. That study found that states with relatively liberal medical-cannabis rules had a significantly higher prevalence of serious mental illness, she writes. Her gloss: more pot smoke, more psychiatric breakdown.
“Fashionable to be mentally ill”
Her second explanation is cultural rather than chemical. Among leftists, and especially among women, Widburg contends, mental illness has become a form of status. She points to a 2020 Pew Research Center American Trends Panel survey of more than 11,500 people, in which 18% reported that a doctor or other health care provider had told them they had a mental health condition. What struck her was the composition of that group: 56.3% of the liberal white women who responded said they had been diagnosed with such a condition.
She acknowledges that a single survey might be dismissed as flawed, then offers a second data point. In 2024, the Skeptic Research Center surveyed 3,000 adults about depressive symptoms, and Gen Z women were overwhelmingly more likely than other cohorts to claim a mental illness, with Gen Z men not far behind.
This, Widburg argues, is not a new observation so much as a rediscovered one. She invokes Wendy Kaminer’s 1992 book, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-help Fashions, which she says documented how the self-help movement’s fixation on personal misery left suburban white women more traumatized by a hangnail than women who had survived Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Those women, too, were overwhelmingly college-educated — a detail Widburg sees echoed in both of the videos she discusses.
The Finnish study she calls the last word
Widburg reserves her sharpest language for gender medicine. Contrary to years of insistence that “transitioning” — which she characterizes as mutilating surgeries and lifelong chemical dependence — would improve the mental health of sexually confused young people, she argues the evidence now shows the opposite.
She highlights a peer-reviewed Finnish study published in Acta Paediatrica that tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland’s gender clinics between 1996 and 2019. A total of 2,083 individuals were studied alongside 16,643 matched controls and followed for up to 25 years. Because Finland’s health registers are mandatory, Widburg notes, no one opts out — it is a complete national picture rather than a sample.
The numbers she relays are stark: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% among adolescents who underwent feminizing reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% among those who underwent masculinizing reassignment. Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls and three times the risk of female controls. “Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment,” the study’s authors concluded, according to Widburg’s account.
Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker, she adds: 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls. The authors’ own reading, as she presents it, is that for some adolescents gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges. Widburg’s conclusion is blunt — when you interfere with young people’s hormones and remove essential body parts, bad things happen to their brains and emotions.
What the essay is really arguing
Strip away the polemics and Widburg is making a claim about causation that runs against much of the current clinical consensus: that what she calls the West’s drugs, hysteria, self-obsession and dangerous fads are not merely correlated with youthful distress but actively produce it. She is candid that she does not know whether the clock can be turned back to something resembling pre-1960s child-rearing, but she calls that “a good start.”
The essay fits comfortably inside American Thinker’s long-running critique of progressive orthodoxies in academia, which Widburg describes as a world that seems to breed these pathologies. It closes with a pitch for donations framed around free expression — a reminder that this is advocacy writing first and analysis second.
Still, the questions she raises are not trivial. If the Finnish register data say what she says they say, that is a serious finding about outcomes for gender-referred adolescents, and it deserves engagement from people who disagree with her broader politics. If the Pew and Skeptic Research Center numbers are accurate, they raise real questions about why young liberal women report diagnoses at such elevated rates — questions that have plausible alternative explanations involving stigma, screening and help-seeking that Widburg does not consider.
Those gaps are the essay’s weakness. Widburg moves from correlation to causation repeatedly — legal marijuana laws to psychosis, self-help culture to trauma claims, gender medicine to psychiatric collapse — without engaging the counterarguments or the confounders that researchers in these fields would raise. The vivid campus videos do a lot of rhetorical work, but two clips are anecdotes, not evidence.
What makes the piece worth reading anyway is the underlying anxiety it channels: that a generation is genuinely struggling, and that the institutions responsible for their care have been slow, or unwilling, to ask why. Whether or not you accept Widburg’s diagnosis, the condition she describes is one a lot of Americans think they are seeing — in viral videos, in their own families, in classrooms. The argument over what is causing it, and what to do, is not close to settled.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/a-college-student-s-manifest-mental-instability-should-worry-us-all/