What awards and scholarships don't protect you from: a mental breakdown

One of the most unique aspects of The Bell Jar is that it provides a detailed description of the process that Esther goes through as she "breaks down" from her state as a high-achieving, promising next-generation poet to a person who makes multiple attempts of suicide and later ends up in a mental health facility. Although Esther's story sounds like a very extreme case of what high social expectations and the pressure to continually run after external validation may do to a young person coming of age, I think the overall framework of the environment and life as a youth that she comes from has strong similarities with the situation that many teens today are experiencing. Here, I outline some key points that help us define the context that led her to break down from the beginning of her New York internship.  

Before the breakdown

While she's doing the internship in New York, Esther effectively condenses her life since childhood into one sentence: “all my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true”. This statement, along with several other instances where she talks about her past life, tells us several things about how she had been living her life: 

• Esther may have started out writing poetry and short stories as a genuine passion, but as she entered the education system and embarked on a path as a student, poetry/writing gained new meanings: the means she used to achieve external validation (ex. awards, scholarships, publications) and what measured her value and level of success as a person. As writing became closely tied to how others and society treated her and, naturally, how she viewed herself, she worked hard "like mad" to earn objective milestones. At the same time, the personal connection and passion that she had for poetry writing became less important; poetry was just a very important work she had to do. Through this experience, Esther may have slowly lost the internal motivation that initially fueled her writing endeavors and became increasingly reliant on external validation and goals to keep her working. Also, relying on external factors made her more vulnerable to easily losing confidence in herself, even as she kept winning awards and praises. 
• (especially through the later years in high school and college) Ironically, while her genuine interest and joy in writing faded, Esther had to declare writing and poetry as her passion as a way to sell herself to the adults in the literature field. In return, she got opportunities (like the New York internship and a scholarship to Smith College) while also secretly feeling suffocated from the ever-growing doubt and uncertainty about her true passion--this is perhaps why Esther never felt happy after her dad died until she was holding hands with the Italian guy in New York. 
• Her dad was a high-achieving professor (or maybe this was Sylvia's dad) and her grandparents are immigrants. Thus, she probably came from an environment with some level of pressure to constantly work hard and excel in American society. (In addition, from the interaction that she has with her mother, we could perhaps imagine that her mom may have been treating her coldly whenever she failed to meet her mom's expectations).
• As Esther explicitly mentions, always working hard and running after one award after another seemed to work--both in improving her social status and her level of satisfaction with what she was doing. Of course, this was until...

The beginning of her breakdown at the New York internship.

• Around the time of her New York internship, Esther starts to feel that she is nearing the end of her years in the education system. Soon, she must choose a career that she would pursue for the rest of her life and compete in the real world, where markers of success and steps to attaining them are much more ambiguous. She would have less access to external factors (ex. family, mentors, scholarships, etc) that had been fueling her motivation to work hard. As Jay Cee tells Esther, to survive in the real world where numerous young girls like her are flooding into New York expecting to be editors, she must work harder, learn more languages, and be genuinely interested in what she is doing. If not, she would soon run out of the energy needed to continue presenting her passion in her field and overcome the immense amount of work and challenges awaiting her. From the perspective of Esther, it makes sense that she would burn out after this realization: she had been working HARD throughout her academic career at the expense of her genuine passion for writing, and being demanded to pump out more fake passion and effort would make her feel overwhelmed and dreadful (it's like being told to run 10 miles at mile pace right after a 3-mile race). 
• And so she is burnt out. As she experiences what it's like to work in the writing/fashion industry, she (for an "unknown" reason) feels that she's slowing down, not pushing herself to fully take advantage of the opportunity, and dropping out of her race. There are several sources of this slow-down: (1) the above-mentioned sense of overwhelm at the amount of additional effort she needs to put in, (2) the anxiety that she doesn't actually know what career she will pursue (since she doesn't know her true passion), and (3) the feeling that, as she is slowing down, other people are marching ahead of her and all her past work of writing and studying are dissipating (loss of self-confidence).
• These three factors augment each other in a vicious feedback loop as she mentally spirals downward during her internship and arrives at the suburbs when the news of not making it to the summer writing program further debunks her previous state of success. The breakdown leaves her feeling worthless, "simple-minded", and futureless, and perhaps make life seem not worth living (--> suicide attempt).

My current state of thought is: How does this story relate to the experiences of many young people in our generation? What are some similarities and differences? Are there any lessons or forewarnings that we could glean from Esther's experience? Who is to blame for Esther's breakdown?