It's suggested that one reason for the change is that young people are now enduring so many overwhelming pressures in their lives that they can't bottle up their feelings anymore and are bringing them into the open and looking for professional guidance to help them out.
Whatever the reason, this big change can only be for the good. When I was young, people were a lot less sympathetic about mental problems and tended to shrug them off as some minor quirk. If you expressed your inability to cope, you would probably be told to "get a grip", "pull yourself together" or "be more positive". Such knee-jerk advice may have helped some people, but many others felt their problems weren't being taken seriously.
There's still some reluctance to use medications to deal with mental problems, and some reluctance to reveal they're being used, but they can be very effective in many cases.
Unfortunately they weren't much help to Jenny's old school friend who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was taking medicines for a number of years before killing herself at the second attempt. Her problems were very deep-rooted and not responsive to any kind of treatment.
Of course there are still people who're unsympathetic to mental problems, partly because they're lucky enough not to have any themselves, partly because they're still stuck in the "get a grip" approach, and partly because mental problems are by their nature invisible. But that sort of ignorance is fast declining.
*but not nearly enough
