#1) Mental Health and Gen Z

Research has demonstrated that Gen Z struggles with mental health. NPR calls this the “silent epidemic” in their report. The following statistics are directly from the NPR report:

There are more than 50 million public school students in the U.S. and as many as 1 in 5 shows signs of a mental health disorder. Most of the nearly 5 million affected students — nearly 80 percent — won’t receive counseling. Or therapy. Or medication. They won’t get any treatment at all. Npr pointed out that children who struggle with mental are uniquely positioned in the public school system in such a way that will make it difficult for them to get treatment. Their teachers are overburdened and are not trained to help with mental health issues. School counselors can help, but there are not enough of them: the average counselor has about 500 students assigned to them. School nurses could help too, but they face great demands: the average number of students per nurse is 1,515 students. School psychologists can be the best people to step in. They have the specialized training — if a school is lucky enough to have one to itself. Similarly to the nurses, the average number of students per child psychologist is 1,400.

 

CODE:

Bringing technology into the picture may be difficult to justify. In fact, many have noticed that the technology may in fact be the root of Gen Z’s mental health issues. PHD Jean Twenge has researched Gen Z who were raised with smartphones and has crafted a compelling argument that their relationship to technology is the cause of Gen Z’s anxiety problems. If technology is already Gen Z’s Pharmakon, solving this issue with more tech has a bit of an irony baked into it. Studying how technologies might be negatively affecting Gen Z might be a good place to have inspiration for how Code can help.

 

LAW:

It seems like changing the policies for how schools address mental health should be the easiest site for change… however, as we know that schools are already complaining of underfunding. According to the Mackinac Center for public policy, almost 30 % of taxes already go to funding schools; they trace the issue here to being poor money management, which might suggest with more research that there is an opportunity to require certain amounts of money be spent on this issue by schools. But spending more money may still make the resources out of reach for most and also may not mean an improvement in resources… only more spending on them.

 

NORMS:
Parent interest groups and documentary filmmakers have started campaigns to help educate the public about Gen Z and mental health. A particularly successful one of these was called “angst”. The Resiliency project at Stanford also shows promise. However popular these programs are while they run, it’s not clear if they have created lasting change. It helps certainly to remove the stigma with getting help, but in the long run, do they statistically drive more people to get the quality support that they need?

 

Markets:

This is actually a really interesting area for new solutions. Right now, several apps have launched that provide on-demand therapy through the smartphone. Before chatting with a professional, a lot of them even offer to chat with an AI bot for free. I know a few social workers at Kaiser Permanente who are disappointed to be migrating to iPhone appointments because they feel less of a personal connection to their clients.  This is an interesting model to explore that may allow for greater access to therapy by lowering the price point and obstacles to “consumption” of a therapy appointment… but making this a sustainable option for all parties involved might take some thought… How might changing the model of the therapy appointment make mental health help available to more people?

 

 

#2) Rape Crisis

(trigger warning: I will talk in a straightforward manner about this issue.)

The modern rates of gender-based violence are shocking. Even more shocking is that the top three countries with the highest amounts of problems are 3) the US, 2) Sweden, and 1) South Africa. There are already high rates of this crime in all three countries… never mind that there is a huge problem with underreporting these crimes.

 

CODE:

Many have tried to find a code-based solution to this problem. For example, the brand new non-profit, better brave, was started by a friend of mine to give women resources outside of their company’s HR department to report sexual assault or discrimination. Other groups have tried to create online versions of rape crisis support. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really stop the crime from happening, but it does help by providing victims with the things they need. Companies are also starting to build in support systems for these kinds of crime into their services. Thinking of how uber has added a button to report issues like these.

 

LAW:

Obviously, a huge area for change. Title 9 was a huge step forward in fighting sexual assault on college campuses, but this was one of the first things that Trump overturned when he got into office. The amount of stigma and the intensity of what one has to go through in order to report these crimes also may be a factor that prohibits individuals from reporting.

 

MARKET:

Can we incentivize men to look out for women and be allies? What about preventing the bystander problem by somehow rewarding unsung heroes? It’s a bit of a bleak thing to propose, so I’d love to think more about how we can use this lever to create change. I am also thinking about how the reverse thing has occurred: in getting negative publicity about toxic male figures in companies during the #metoo movement, we may have seen some unconscious (or very conscious) boycotting going on. I’d like to see a study done on whether that is effective or not.

 

NORMS:

In the market one, I noted how male allies might be a solution to this issue. This seems like the most important place to create change. Of course, we should teach men not to rape. And we should also help them teach each other not to rape and not to support rape culture. This is, of course, a massive systemic cultural issue so it would also really take some thought to think about smart interventions that could be made here.

 

#3) Fashion & Pollution   

Fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world… or so sustainable clothing companies say.  We intuitively know that “Fast Fashion” (the same phenomenon of “fast food” but with clothing) has become a huge industry with fast-fashion chains like Forever 21, H&M, Zara and Topshop —but it is hard to get data on how environmentally unsound these services are. Not to mention that there are issues with human rights. It’s been a long open secret that the cheap clothing made by these brands are produced in factories that jeopardize workers health.

Market:

Due to market incentives and the very understandably ‘human’ desire to be trendy and ‘cool,’ the fashions keep changing, meaning more and more production of low quality, high waste clothing that is bought, worn a few times, then thrown away. H&M have tried to initiate better ways to recycle their clothing and donate it, but this works with less than .1% of the clothing sold at these stories. The inexpensive clothing is poor quality, with low resale value, and there’s just too much of it.

This is a very interesting site because it’s actually hard to separate out earnest attempts to be ecofriendly from the ploys that prey on consumer guilt for an excuse to jack up clothing prices. For example, on many sustainable clothing sites you’ll see the claim that fashion is the #2 most polluting industry in the world… but no one seems to be able to back up that claim. How might we actually get tastemakers to shift to more sustainable business practices? And what about the huge overhead costs of investing in ecofriendly production methods that mire companies in their ways?

Law:

There’s already a lot of laws in place around pollution due to fashion and human rights… but they don’t seem to be effective. What about if we taxed trash fashion? Who would that hurt? Who would that help?

Code:

Online stores are finding eco-friendly ways to produce, distribute, market and resell their clothing. For example, Reformation, an eco-friendly brand, allows customers to resell clothes they don’t like through their platform to other customers.

Norms:
the norms right now are often just marketing ploys that harness insecurity and the human desire to belong in order to drive consumption. I think of Gwenyth Paltrow’s site, Goop, which has demonstrated that beautiful, highly adored people can sell anything they want to people provided that they market it as the ‘secret to their beauty’. For example, A 55-year-old woman in Spain died after receiving bee sting therapy; a service which was promoted heavily by goop and Gwenyth Paltrow.  What would happen if the whole industry (including tastemakers) shifted its marketing norms along side its cost-structure in order to incentivize a different kind of fashion consumption that would be based on long-term sustainable and ecofriendly use? What if consumers expected their clothes to last longer and be of higher quality so that they could actually be recycled?