Ten-Minute Version

Photo by Raphael Lovaski on Unsplash

I didn’t want to go. I thought it would be a terrible time. I actually hoped it would rain harder than it did and that everyone would decide to stay home. But my daughter, her friend and my wife dragged me along. I went to a Taylor Swift concert – in a parking lot.

Much is made of the desperation of today’s tween and teen girls. It seems every single one has a mental health diagnosis and is on meds. We just locked them away for two years and forced them onto social media for any semblance of human contact and now we condemn social media for setting unrealistic ideals, bullying, shortening attention spans and worse. We push them unprepared into a world of someone else’s rebellion, where the climate, the economy and very old people in politics who won’t step down despite being completely out of touch, plot to do them in much too early. Kids are supposed to rebel, but rebellion requires a stable home and social structure, a widely held system of beliefs, to rebel against. Without this anchor that a developing young mind can return to when things get too scary, we get only chaos. Today we leave our kids a world of chaos and expect them to thrive with little notion of what to expect next and no promise that their creativity, ideas and initiative can make the world a better place. For them the world is already lost.

We have normalized mental illness and treat human flourishing and traditional values as aberrations.

We pulled into the distant parking lot, for the lots close to the stadium were already full, at about 4:00. With flags flying and music playing and a mass of girls beginning to move toward the gates the crowd looked like a gathering of troops mobilizing for an invasion. Kids were dressed in uniforms of pink sequined dresses and cowboy boots and other girlie clothes and danced and smiled in anticipation. The scene was nothing but upbeat.

I understand why the psychiatry industry has moved to medicalize mental illness. If we attribute aberrant and upsetting behaviors to biochemistry we can treat them with medication. And medication, and monitoring it once it is prescribed, is extremely profitable. So much so that we get new meds every day to treat new pathologies that didn’t even exist a generation ago and write more and more kids prescriptions they don’t really need because they’re not really medically sick.

At the same time we’ve so broadened the criteria for major mental illnesses, illnesses that are, in fact, diseases, that children who wouldn’t even come close to being diagnosed with diseases like bipolar disorder under the criteria established just a few years ago, criteria that have now been expanded to include behaviors that used to be considered normal in teenagers, upsetting yes, but normal, are now considered severe enough to be treated with medication. And that keeps the money rolling in.

70,000 people saw Taylor Swift at Lincoln Financial Field last Saturday and we couldn’t get a ticket. We set out to stake a place in the parking lot and see what we could hear and see. We and 20,000 other people. The genius of Swift, besides writing true earworms, is that she understands the power of fashion. With every release she’s created a new persona, complete with clothes, and last weekend girls dressed up in their favorite outfits, their favorite Swift era, and became part of a tribe. Pop music has always been like this, from swing to rockabilly to the mods and rockers to the hippies to disco to punk to goth to hip-hop to grunge to normcore and now to Swift, and in these uniforms listening to this music kids become a part of something different – a true community. As the night darkened and the music started these tens of thousands of girls were part of something. And their lives were truly better for it.

Their lives are not made better by the touted developments in medicine and psychiatry. More kids than ever are on meds, and suicide attempts, dropouts and drug addiction have never been worse. What used to be marginal, the margins of behavior, identity and politics, is now accepted as normal, desirable even, and kids and parents both accept that these things that erode order, security and unity are OK. The dysfunctional seems to have won, and values, morals and promise have crumbled before it.

Mental illness is a legitimate response to a world out of balance.

All seemed balanced at the concert, though. My daughter and her friend charmed their way into a pre-concert party, a party we couldn’t get tickets to either, and traded friendship bracelets with strangers and belted out karaoke on stage for a couple hundred people. Then we crowded in with thousands outside an open wall of the stadium and listened to the perfect sound, and saw the impressive lightshow, of the concert inside. My daughter and her friend said the night was the highlight of their lives.

The climax of the night was when Swift began the song “All Too Well,” and the kids in the parking lot realized it was the 10-minute version, Taylor’s version, a statement by an artist who took back her work from lawyers and businesspeople and made it her’s again, made it better, and won the kids’ hearts for doing it. The song is a relentless ramble which tells a story of heartbreak through an emotional crescendo not unlike Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” I noticed something in the music you don’t pick up when it plays on the radio. In the girls stomping on the pavement shouting Swift’s chanted choruses there was rage. A rage against a world, in school and in the media, that contradicts the messages many of them are taught at home. A world that tears down everything anyone has ever held dear in its grinding pessimism and winks at them that they can be anything they want to be on any given day. But if you’re anything you want to be on any given day then you’re nothing, and this nothingness is reinforced by parents who have abdicated their duty to teach their kids what is normal.

This rage was a stand against the hopelessness and cynicism demanded of them; required to get by; reinforced by every message they hear, and totally negated by a sad song that rings of hope, that through the cathartic performance of Taylor Swift allowed these tweens and teens a night of liberation and joy.

Of course I never want to hear another Taylor Swift song again, but days later they’re still stuck in my head. Also stuck in my head is the long-buried truth that for most kids a pop music movement is healthier than any drugs or therapy we can give them.

I wish all those girls in all those costumes belting out all those songs (Swift played over forty for over three hours) could do this every weekend. They’d drive their parents nuts and put things back to where they should be. Kids being different, kids believing they’re starting a revolution, and parents calling them crazy, but not mentally ill.