There Is An Actual Trauma Center For Millennials Who Can’t Cope With Adult Life

I wish I was making this up, you guys. I really, really do.

According to this, there is a trauma center in the Chicago-area called Yellowbrick where Millennials pay upwards of $28,000 per month because they haven’t yet figured out how to become fully-functioning adults. These are people who get into their late-20s/early-30s and don’t have jobs, stable family lives, and living with their parents after graduating from college – and they’re characterizing this as a mental illness.

I say this with all the kindness I can muster for my generation right now: “WILL YOU COLOSSAL IDIOTS STOP MAKING THE REST OF US LOOK BAD???”

The author of the piece, Molly Osberg, spoke about the first time she heard of Yellowbrick and how at age 22 she felt insulted by the concept –

The article, with little irony, describes a treatment center fostering independence in college-age youth through the 24-hour availability of staff who instruct residents in basic life skills: scheduling, cleaning, “showing up.” It mentions a boy so stuck he couldn’t bring himself to turn in a final paper at an Ivy League school.

Maybe it was my sense that at 22 I was a full-fledged adult (a certainty that has diminished every year since) but at the time I found the article infantilizing and absurd. The Yellowbrick model struck me as an extension of the institutions, like private colleges, that stunt the development of the privileged by treating them like children—a symptom of the affliction rather than its cure.

Osberg talks about several former patients of Yellowbrick and none of them seemed to have any actual diagnosable problems. In fact, she says that there’s very little difference between her as someone who considers herself to be a functioning adult, and the Yellowbrick patients who think they have to cling to as many vestiges of childhood as possible for as long as possible –

At times, in my conversations with former Yellowbrick patients, my notebook seemed like the only thing separating me from the people I was interviewing. A month after I visited, I dreamt I returned for a follow-up interview, knocked back a few too many IPAs, lost my job, and stayed.

[…]

Who hasn’t considered, in their darkest moments, that their poor life choices might be an indication of something inside them that’s deeply and irrevocably damaged? How much do you have to fuck up your life in young adulthood to never recover? Stability is rare and fleeting. It’s not the reality for most people I know.

The stories the affluent tell about their lives, the neuroses they stoke, trickle down and become the standard for everyone else. On some level, everyone in their twenties is waiting for the Big One to come: the final mistake that can’t be corrected, the thing that keeps a promising young person from turning into whatever passes these days for an actualized adult.

Isn’t that what people used to call “Real Life”? How in the world did we get to the point where people in their late-twenties still can’t cut the proverbial apron strings?

Oh, but the criticism these kids got from their parents as they were growing up is akin to the same kind of PTSD that soldiers returning home from war experience.

No joke. One of the “experts” actually said that –

When I met with one of Yellowbrick’s specialists, he spoke to me of “complex trauma,” which occurs when hurtful experiences—for example, a child’s parents deriding them—are repeated over a period of years, creating symptoms similar to PTSD. Some historians have catalogued as many as 80 different names for post-traumatic stress, from combat stress to nostalgia to “disorderly action of the heart.”

We are so screwed, you guys.

The good news is that People With Actual Brains are starting to characterize Yellowbrick as an elaborate con job (HELLO! You spent nearly $30,000 per month to learn things that most people learn as a natural consequence of life??) –

That’s the implicit takeaway from Fusion’s impressive profile of Yellowbrick, a mental health facility and trauma center for a certain kind of patient: relatively privileged millennials who can’t seem to adjust to the demands of adult life.

It’s a scam, of course. There doesn’t seem to be anything especially wrong with these people, in a medical sense—or, put another way, they’re suffering from the same kinds of fears, traumas, and stresses that plague practically everyone. But the patients have been convinced—scammed may be the better word—to believe that their struggles are diagnosable, treatable, and fixable. With the right therapy and medicine, and for the right price, 20-somethings who can’t hold jobs, finish school, or form lasting relationships will be transformed into fully functioning adults.

Did I mention that Yellowbrick costs $28,000 per month? There’s that. Patients must commit to stay at least 10 weeks, but many stay much longer—until their parents run out of money.

Now, if we could just get Millennials to figure out that this culture of victimhood that they’ve been sold is just as big a scam, they’d be golden!

What I will NEVER understand about Millennials (apart from the fact that I’m somehow considered to be part of this pathetic generation) is why they would want to act like children for the rest of their lives? Why do you want to be treated like a child and infantilized like this? Why do you want to have everything handed to you the minute you start crying about it?

Sure, it sounds easy. Even appealing on a certain level. Especially on days where life gets tough and you have to deal with setbacks and you wish you didn’t have to do that anymore. But that means you’re dependent on someone else. Someone else gets to choose for you. Someone else makes decisions for you. And a lot of the decisions they make absolutely SUCK. But you can’t say “WAIT! STOP! I don’t want want that!” because you’ve given up your choices and autonomy in favor of some oh-so-benevolent faceless Big Brother who insists that he knows better than you do how you should live your life.

*cough*Obamacare *cough, cough*

You want freedom and liberty? Be adult enough to take responsibility for it. Own your choices and own your life. And accept that you’re going to make mistakes. Learn from them and grow from the experience. Or, you know, you could just pay thousands of dollars to live in a trauma center and eat pudding while you color all day.

It’s your choice, Millennials.