It is totally unacceptable to use the word 'female' as a noun. Not only is it 100% grammatically incorrect, there is something sinister and disrespectful behind it, as though 'woman' is a bad word that needs to be erased. My mother - who incidentally spent 40 years as a language teacher and is a massive boring pedant about grammar - does it and it is pretty much the only thing I correct her on. It bothers me so much. If you want to talk about a female person, the word you are looking for is WOMAN. Female is an adjective and cannot be used on its own. 'A female' is bad, bad, bad English.
Previous generations were rubbish about mental health but the current generation is also rubbish, just in a different way. It comes from a good place, for the most part, but it still does damage IMO. There is such a lack of basic understanding of human emotion and mental health that attempts to rectify the mistakes of the past have led to other mistakes - one of them being giving too much signficance to fleeting feelings. The outcome of that, in my experience, is making younger people fearful and anxious, because they believe difficult life events will break them, or damage them irreparably. I hope we end up settling somewhere in the middle, where we realise that it's good to talk about things, and to be open about struggles and fears, but we must also accept that life is bloody hard, you're going to pick up scars along the way and sometimes something that seems difficult or awful at the time can actually be a massively positive and formative experience in the long run - sometimes, suffering can be good for you. It's not possible to have a stress-free life with no sadness and I think most people wouldn't really want that anyway, becuase it would be a life without any real investment or risk.
Something I've always thought, since I was a kid, is that when someone criticises someone else, most of the time that criticism reflects something they feel/believe about themselves. When I was younger, when bullies would try to say something nasty to me, I always felt embarrassed on their behalf, because IMO nothing is more exposing than someone criticising someone else - it reveals a person's innermost, darkest thoughts about themselves. If you want to improve yours self esteem or your overall view on the world, look at how you judge others. It can be an ugly thing to look at, but it's very revealing.