Senator Robinhood Padilla, during a recent hearing on children’s safety in social media, brushed off the rising tide of depression among today’s youth, labeling them as “weak” and reminiscing about a time when such words didn’t exist in our vocabulary. It’s a classic “tough guy” narrative, “In my day, we didn’t have depression; we had grit.”
But as we look at the reality from our vantage point here in Palawan, where the isolation of island life can often amplify the silence of a struggling mind, it’s clear that the Senator isn’t just misreading the room, he’s misreading history. It is, frankly, a crying shame that a public servant would use the platform of a televised live hearing to peddle such regressive rhetoric. The irony of his position is his own ignorance; he stands in a position of power, tasked with protecting the vulnerable, yet chooses to weaponize his misunderstanding against the very people he should be advocating for.
The Makabayan bloc lawmakers were quick to fire back, and for good reason. To suggest that depression is a modern invention of a “soft” generation is like saying cancer didn’t exist before we had the technology to biopsy it.
Decades ago, mental health wasn’t absent; it was just nameless in the Philippines. It was the “eccentric” Tita who never left her room, the “melancholic” Nanay who stared out the window for days, or the Tatay who “drank himself to an early grave.”
We didn’t call it depression then because we lacked the language, not because we lacked the suffering. We buried it under the guise of “bad moods” or “family secrets,” often with tragic results. To brush it off now as a trend is a brutal insult to every Filipino currently fighting for their lives against an invisible enemy.
For a long time, mental struggle in the Filipino household was dismissed as kaartehan or a lack of faith. This stems from a culture that historically equated survival with silence. If you had food on the table and a roof over your head, your “feelings” were seen as a luxury the working class couldn’t afford. Anxiety was rebranded as nerbiyos, and depression was simply being matampuhin.
We ignored the mind because we were too busy surviving for the body. But what changed? Science finally caught up to our suffering. The shift from seeing mental health as a character flaw to a clinical reality, a chemical imbalance, allowed the younger generation to stop blaming their “weakness” and start treating their illness.
The irony of the “weak” label is that many children suffering today are carrying the weight of generational trauma passed down by the very parents who claim to be “tougher.” We are seeing an endless cycle where the “grit” of the previous generation was actually just repressed trauma. That “disciplined” household of the 80s was often a breeding ground for anxiety, where children were raised on fear rather than understanding.
Today’s youth are not weaker; they are simply the ones finally brave enough to break the chain. They are processing the baggage their ancestors were told to just “carry on” with.
As someone who has navigated the suffocating fog of depression and the jagged edges of anxiety for years, I find the Senator’s remarks particularly galling. For many of us, this isn’t a choice or a personality trait; it is a seasonal sickness, a recurring storm that settles in our bones regardless of how “tough” we try to be.
So. to hear a leader dismiss this agony as a lack of backbone isn’t just a difference of opinion, ito ay sampal sa mukha ng bawat taong pilit bumabangon kahit hirap na.
Now, the youth are navigating a digital panopticon. In the age of social media, the school bully follows you into your bedroom via a smartphone. The pressure to perform, to be “perfect,” and to compete with a global standard of success is a psychological weight that the previous generation simply never had to carry.
Calling this generation “weak” for speaking up about their mental state is a profound misunderstanding of bravery. In the old days, being “tough” meant keeping your mouth shut and suffering in silence. Today, being tough means having the courage to say, “I am not okay, and I need help.”
Here in Palawan, we pride ourselves on being the “Last Frontier.” But that frontier spirit shouldn’t apply to our hearts. We are a province of tight-knit communities, yet we still see the stigma of mental illness lurking in our barangays, of people we’re close of, voluntarily deleting themselves.
When a national leader suggests that mental health struggles are merely a lack of character, it pushes people back into the shadows. The Mental Health Act (RA 11036) was passed precisely because we recognized that “staying positive” isn’t a medical cure for a chemical imbalance in the brain.
We wouldn’t tell a person with a broken leg to “just walk it off,” so why do we tell a person with a fractured spirit to “just be strong”? Padilla’s comments reflect a generational disconnect that we can no longer afford. The youth aren’t weaker; they are more aware. They are articulating a pain that their elders were forced to hide.
Instead of mocking the labels they use, perhaps we should be asking why the world we’ve built for them has made these labels so necessary. Resilience isn’t about how much you can suppress, but about how well you can recover. And you can’t recover from something you aren’t allowed to name.