To me it comes off as a kind of PSA for Vice's 20-something target audience. There's nothing really new to take away if you're generally familiar with the current understanding of how the brain develops, and if you've experienced adolescence.

It's a given that mental health is difficult to understand and will be for a long time. How can a human fully grasp the pathology of another brain? To get reach even a basic understanding requires a lot of individual time and effort.

But prevention - that's something we all might be able to do something about. Mental illnesses are systemic and build up from patterns of stress that we deal with in youth and adolescence. This researcher mentioned social "risk factors" like poor engagement and sheltering. But I can't help but suspect that the sheer scale of modern society is just not something we are designed to cope with. People thrive with structure, and modern societies give us the curse of too much freedom and not enough guidance.

We're talking about illnesses that cost us $300 billion/year (in the US), more than twice that of all cancers [0]. Some kind of mental illness affects almost a fifth of adults. You can't look at this and not suspect that this is a disease of modernity. If we want to solve it, we need to solve society.

That's a bit bold, sweeping, and maybe tangential, but it's what I wanted to say.

[0] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/cost/index.shtml