It's Not Just the Kids-- No One is All Right

By now everyone has had a say about the mental health crisis experienced by America’s adolescents. Most especially, everyone has something to say about the fact that American girls are especially prone to be depressed, anxious and suicidal.

I have opined on the subject before. Now, its Niall Ferguson’s turn:

According to Haidt, there has never been a generation as “depressed, anxious and fragile” as Generation Z, Americans born between 1997 and 2012. They have “extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” Haidt lays the blame firmly on social media — to be precise, apps such as Facebook and Instagram on smartphones — and is working on a book making that case. (He’s already published much of his data and a series of related academic articles.)

Now, Ferguson joins me and several others in being unwilling to blame it on social media. The crisis, he says, extends to American adults, too:

There’s only one glitch with this harrowing narrative: The reality is that there is a mental illness epidemic throughout the population. It’s not just the kids who are not all right.

How does he explain the problem? Simply put, and these are not his terms, we live in a therapy culture. In a therapy culture we are all obliged to admit to having some form of mental illness, lest we be dismissed from normal social groups:

The issue remains a battleground for social scientists, but I remain firmly persuaded that the creation of vast online networks greatly increased our vulnerability to contagions of the mind, including conspiracy theories and “mind viruses” of all kinds.

He continues:

There is, however, another possibility that cannot be ruled out. With the number of therapists growing faster in the US than average for all occupations — and with mental health services booming in college campuses — young Americans surely have more access to psychotherapy than any previous generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings.

The daughter of an English friend of mine began her undergraduate studies at a renowned American university last year. She chose to leave because she found the social atmosphere oppressive. “Everyone seems to have their mental health problem that they want to talk about,” she told me. “I said I didn’t have one and was pretty well-adjusted. They said: ‘Ah, your trauma must be really deeply buried.’”

And also:

In America today, the peer group pressure among teenagers is to get counseling rather than to get crazee. I feel sorry for Generation Z. Compared with being a teenager in the 1970s, being a teenager in the 2020s seems like no fun at all. But can there really have been as many suicide attempts by high schoolers in 2021 as the YRBS implies — which would be around 2.5 million?

I find the point well taken. In a therapy culture you define yourself in terms of your emotional distress. If you do not suffer any emotional distress, you are in denial. If you are not working on your emotional problems, you are a fraud-- unfit for therapy culture.

It’s an intriguing idea, one with which I find useful. The large number of mental cases in America signifies a new and more ominous turn in American culture.