Taken together, the two articles painted a similarly dark picture of a nation of college students shuffling around like shell-shocked zombies, occasionally lashing out at their elders for no reason, but also poised to collapse emotionally at the slightest provocation: a B- on an exam, for example, or a rude remark from a professor (or a tone-deaf email from an administrator, or a poop swastika …).

It’s no wonder these stories resonated — particularly Haidt and Lukianoff’s essay, which has more than half a million shares on Facebook (the preferred social network of parents of millennial-age kids everywhere) and 25,000 on Twitter, and which has been cited frequently in recent days: In much the same way the YouTube videos fit into the narrative set forth by these articles, the articles themselves fit effortlessly onto a social-panic trail that had already been blazed by story after story of millennials being coddled, suffering the ravages of helicopter-parenting, being self-obsessed, being unable to function like normal employees in the workplace, sleeping around endlessly and pointlessly, and so on. Of course kids are getting more fragile, and of course it’s hurting them. Just look at all those overly sensitive tweets! The calls for trigger warnings! The overwrought YouTube videos! It’s true because it’s obviously true, because the evidence is right in front of our faces.

Except when you actually unpack these claims — when you put them in context and look for real evidence that kids are getting more fragile — there’s a lot less here than meets the eye. The true story of college students and mental health has to do with a hollowing out of the United States’ mental-health services, with overtaxed counseling centers, with a fundamental shift in the role that colleges serve, with changes in the composition of the nation’s student body. This is all very, very complicated, and none of it can be fairly summarized as “Kids these days are getting so fragile!”