To Kai Wright, the host of the politically themed podcast “The United States of Anxiety” from WNYC, which debuted this past fall, such numbers are all too explicable. “We’ve been at war since 2003, we’ve seen two recessions,” Mr. Wright said. “Just digital life alone has been a massive change. Work life has changed. Everything we consider to be normal has changed. And nobody seems to trust the people in charge to tell them where they fit into the future.”

For “On Edge,” Ms. Petersen, a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, traveled back to her alma mater, the University of Michigan, to talk to students about stress. One student, who has A.D.H.D., anxiety and depression, said the pressure began building in middle school when she realized she had to be at the top of her class to get into high school honors classes, which she needed to get into Advanced Placement classes, which she needed to get into college.

“In sixth grade,” she said, “kids were freaking out.”

This was not the stereotypical experience of Generation X.

Urban Dictionary defines a slacker as “someone who while being intelligent, doesn’t really feel like doing anything,” and that certainly captures the ripped-jean torpor of 1990s Xers. Their sense of tragic superiority was portrayed by Ethan Hawke’s sullen, ironic Troy in “Reality Bites,” who asserted that life is a “a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes,” so one must take pleasure in the little things: a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, a pack of Camel straights.

For these youths of the 1990s, Nirvana’s “Lithium” was an anthem; coffee was a constant and Ms. Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” about an anhedonic Harvard graduate from a broken home, dressed as if she could have played bass in Hole, was a bible.