A quarter of children aged between four and six say they are "stressed out", and the proportion rises to just over half of children under 16, reported a survey published late last week. It's getting just too much. Children who should have no thoughts in their heads but how to skip, kick a football and splash poster paint around are cracking up.

Evidence of the increasing incidence of children's mental ill-health is reaching mountainous proportions: self-harm, attention deficit disorder, depression and obsessive behaviour have all increased sharply among children in recent years. So this survey, conducted by a market research company, TNS, wasn't saying anything we hadn't already heard plenty of times before.

What was interesting was how this survey was reported as "Britain in danger of breeding a generation of emotional weaklings": this generation of children was more cosseted than any previous one, and more neurotic, and perhaps the two phenomena were connected. The Times concluded in a leader that we are fast becoming a nation of "emotional hypochondriacs" as stress is transformed into a disease by a growing industry of therapists, counsellors and lawyers eager for new business.

The coverage reflected an increasingly popular view that the growing incidence of stress and depression is a bad case of the emperor's new clothes. We've turned our personal shortcomings into a disease. Individualism has generated chronic self-indulgence and hugely inflated aspirations to happiness while sapping our will to overcome adversity. Past generations had much worse to deal with, but showed stoicism, forbearance and fortitude. Chimney sweeps and match girls had no time to worry about stress; they were too concerned about where their next meal was coming from. While parents once buried their tiny children in droves and suffered pestilence, war and poverty with a cheerful smile, we are running to the therapist's couch over the smallest setback. It can all be boiled down to "Buck up!"

There's a remarkable theme of nostalgia underpinning the argument: along with the warm beer and cricket on the village green, we British had a stiff upper lip, we valued reserve, we kept our emotions to ourselves. The same nostalgia was evident in Patrick West's recent pamphlet Conspicuous Compassion for the rightwing thinktank Civitas, in which he tackled another aspect of our emotional culture. Public displays of emotion were, he argued, a "symptom of a fragmented society that has exchanged reason for emotion, action for gesture, cool reserve for mawkish sentimentality". But the Victorians knew a thing or two about "mawkish sentimentality", so the historical accuracy of this golden age of British stoicism is pretty doubtful.

In one way, this debate about the state of the nation's emotional life seems quaintly old-fashioned. It fits into a long tradition of western philosophy's suspicion of emotion. Rationality was the great principle of the Enlightenment and belief in its superiority and distinction from our emotions is still surprisingly common. What we still struggle to understand - even after huge advances in neuroscience - is the intimate interplay of emotion and reason.

In another respect, the debate over whether stress is real or manufactured reflects a very modern set of phenomena and urgently requires that the old-fashioned distaste for emotion is abandoned if we are going to grasp the nature of what we are dealing with. There's a real danger of an ostrich mentality, insisting to all the teenagers with suicidal tendencies that what they feel is not real, they're just unwitting victims of a gigantic cultural fraud. That just won't wash.

As Frank Furedi points out in his critique Therapy Culture, there has been rapid growth of a "therapeutic vocabulary". The use of words such as "self-esteem", "trauma" and "stress" soared in newspapers during the 90s. The crunch issue is whether you believe this kind of language encouraged the very phenomena it was describing and pathologised conditions which other generations have endured without fuss, or whether people turned to this language to articulate a new sense of mental distress.

I put my money on the latter, and the fact that there is a particularly rightwing complexion to the opposite view is no accident. Rising mental illness seems an inescapable consequence of the kind of rapid, disruptive change driven by market capitalism. It's not that people have gone soft so much as that they are profoundly disorientated by the ceaseless discontinuity of change. Experience becomes utterly random and meaningless. You were doing really well in your job but you still got fired; you thought your relationship was strong but your partner has fallen out of love with you. Appalling images of suffering in the world are interrupted by advertisements for car insurance: barbarism and banality, cheek by jowl. What lies behind the escalating weight of emotional distress is that awful struggle to make meaning, that instinct that our lives should have a narrative and a purpose and should make some sense.

Whereas previous generations had a very strong grasp of the meaning of their lives (whatever the catastrophes which befell them), of their own identity and where they belonged, we are living out Marx's prediction that "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned". Meaning inspires resilience: if you have some explanation for what happens, it gives strength. That's what past generations drew comfort from. It is the sheer meaninglessness of the chaotic instability of our experiences which exposes us to despair. We have no answer to "why me?" We have no account for the suffering which is the inevitable lot of human beings - death, disease, betrayal, frustration - other than to employ desperate strategies to avoid them.

Freud said that human beings oscillate between their need for security and their need for freedom. At some point in the 20th century, we pretty much junked security in favour of freedom. The price we pay for that is a kind of nervy, risk-taking rollercoaster ride of adrenaline and depression. We've replaced lives that were nasty, brutish and short with lives which are insecure, disorientated and long.

Inevitably, there are many casualties, and they need help, not disbelief. That's where the therapy and emotionalisation of contemporary culture are part of the solution, not the problem; both are part of how we now develop an account of our lives which connects with that of others in the wake of declining religious and political narratives. It can play a crucial role in the lives of many who manage, as Charles Baudelaire put it in 1845, a kind of heroism of everyday life, in which they make themselves at home in the maelstrom of modern life.

It's an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that it can call on few of the markers such as extended family, community and faith upon which previous generations relied so heavily. And it is accompanied, I suspect, by just as much endurance, forbearance and cheerful determination as shown by any previous generation.

m.bunting@theguardian.com