Why are American teenagers so sad and anxious?
theringer.com
theringer.com
To be sure, it's braided with other trends in the breakdown of societal institutions, civic engagement, etc. in ways where cause and effect can be difficult to disentangle.
I was fortunate to spend my elementary school years in one of the small number of places in the US that isn't just shopping strips, stroads and subdivisions--though I was intellectually aware that a lot of the country was precisely and more or less exclusively those things. But then, around the beginning of high school, we moved to a place that much more resembles how much of Middle America lives. The mental-emotional health contrast was very stark.
The car sprawl affects teenagers especially strongly, since they are dependent either on access to an automobile (or a willing chauffeur) for absolutely everything. The lack of anything describable as a public realm in most of the US, the overpowering but unarticulated sense of not really having anywhere to 'go', a world largely without consequential destinations, interesting architecture, intimations of human activity, a social space in which to comprehend seeing and being seen, and healthy spontaneous interactions seems to me to lie at the root of a lot of other pathologies.
That's the single biggest societal ill that stands out to me, based on my life experience, at least.
I think a Canadian rock band once wrote a song about that.
I live in a place like this and it's awful. All you can reach by foot is kilometers of insanely polluted 4-lane roads and and shopping malls. If you don't know someone with a large flat, nowhere is welcoming besides your own studio. How anybody can last here for more than a couple years is beyond me.
I think that's the worst one. You grow up having to obey the "grown-ups" and not being allowed to question anything they do, then progressively realise most of them are just idiots who are running your world into a wall.
Does Jonathan Haidt (who is very close to my own age BTW) not get that most of these things can happen with video games too? There might be a lot of other benefits to being outdoors, and drawbacks to video games, but in terms of these specific things that are core to his thesis, the contrast is nowhere near as great as he makes it out to be.
We should filter this sort of posts, along with the "things very smart people do".
This quote seems to suggest that being anxious has not always been part of being a teenager. What evidence do you have otherwise?
You say that like today's teens live in some dull high school drama. There's a loneliness epidemic, the environment is getting destroyed, money gets more concentrated each year, and house prices will be out of reach of most of today's teens for at least several decades, or possibly their whole lives. If you think all that is "the normal stress of being a teen", you're burying your head in the sand.
Calling declining mental health "normal" and attributing it to "growing up" is a patronising perspective that implies teens are too dumb to be impacted by actual political and environmental problems, or alternatively, that these problems don't exist. I think we could do with less of that and more young influence in politics.
The article (and the interviewee) seems to blame social media, but maybe, just maybe, the teenagers are reacting naturally to American society becoming truly sad and hopeless in the past decades. I mean, look at what a mess the adults have made of this blessed world.
There’s much deeper social ills than “the world sucks now.” In purely material comfort terms, they’ve got it better than ever. It’s the social environment that’s deteriorated - and social media is part of that picture.
Terrible things happened in the past, but people in the past were not happy about them. They worried, they were depressed, they abused alcohol to feel better, they got violent toward weaker people to blow the steam.
I just don't see your claim in those data.
They go up last 20 years, from the point when they were lowest.
This is news to young adults, because as far as we can tell, we won't ever be able to afford a home, and those of us who got conned into college will spend a lifetime of indentured servitude paying off student debt.
I have been long thinking about how to address comments in this general style. You can see how they happen - we all agree indentured servitude and certainly slavery are fundamental moral wrongs, so grand historical narratives get crafted where each individual as part of the collective suffers all the worst wrongs of the institutional system, rather than accurately representing the average life. "Read more primary sources" is obviously not a feasible solution for a general audience.
But briefly, I would say that people can suffer, be unhappy, and feel and be terribly wronged without anxiety and depression, which become more common when basic social needs aren't met. It isn't surprising that anxiety and depression are on the rise when fewer and fewer people live consistently in the same household with the same people embedded in the same community with strong real-world social networks. People can thrive in crushing poverty of the likes the average American has never imagined when those conditions are met.
If you aren't satisfied by that, take this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
and compare it with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
In terms of material comforts and opportunities, it seems doubtful that the average American is worse off than the average Congolese, but the American is more likely to kill himself. Some of these countries with lower suicide rates have de facto slavery. And again...a fifth of Americans are also on psychiatric medications that a lot of people can't afford and we're still killing ourselves at this rate.
I wonder if anyone has done any sort of study/sample to see if people who take psychiatric meds are more or less likely to voluntarily check out.
Every time you hear people complain about too much debt, they are actually complaining that people are saving too much money.
That's back on the timeline again.
Health, education, and rent costs seem to never find a ceiling let alone a reason to go down. Home ownership appears unattainable.
The climate crisis plagues the world as we are still recovering from an actual plague.
Democracy took a hard right turn and while there's been a little progress lately, protections and freedoms once thought inalienable have disappeared.
The ability to do as well as previous generations has evaporated.
Gun violence and shootings have become expected.
In the face of all this - its more of a surprise kids are able to have a positive vision of the future at all.
I didn't do anything special and I ended up okay and happy. My wife and I both went to in-state schools in a red state. Had in the 10s of thousands of debt between us but that wasn't undue burden by any means (It was worth the investment actually!) Not saying everything is amazing but it reads to me like excuses.
For instance, "I'm in debt with a degree that I can't get a job for." Who cares? Most people get their next job due to their last few, not their original degree. You wouldn't be the first person to pivot your career. But it's easier to have an excuse.
Also, the biggest college debt issue is among people who did not managed to finish their degrees. It is simply not true that they can just pivot career and all will be cool. Even among people who did finished, pivot toward something well paid is not easy or feasible.
I had it easy, you had it easy. I graduated into pretty good economy and was not actually stressed about my ability to prosper. That does not mean it was so for everyone ever since.
Climate issues are worse because time passed without large action. But I'd say public opinion is even stronger in favor of fixing it. And the US just passed a giant bill about it.
On social issues, yes Roe was just overturned, but the endgame of that is still in flux. Marijuana legalization is becoming near commonplace. Gay marriage was on the fringe when I was in high school. I was out of college by the time it was fully legalized. Of course, that is now under threat. But just because it's under threat doesn't mean the future is borked. Teens catastrophize - always have.
> Also, the biggest college debt issue is among people who did not managed to finish their degrees.
If people don't have useful degrees anyways, isn't it best to not waste the extra money to finish?
Also, people use this college debt in-the-large as an excuse in-the-small. Most people made boneheaded financial decisions as teenagers and then continued them as adults (which they are from their first year onward). I wasn't dumb enough to fork out 100s of thousands to go to the prestigious private school I got into. My in-state school was clearly superior on paper. All it took was for me to not be status-seeking.
I don't even think I had it especially easy. I switched my major a few times in college - I could've been a chemical engineer, which I don't think I'd enjoy (personally or professionally) as much as where I ended up in computing. My wife switched from a non-lucrative degree to computing because she thought about what her life would be like in 5 years either way.
These people struggle the most to pay the debt. Their amount is non negligible. Their peers who finished struggle significantly less, this is based on stats. Also you made up useless degree, because arguing against that situation is easier.
It seems to me that you are not really interested in looking at data and economy, but are more interested in projecting superiority and judgement. But that is emotions based thinking, not a logical one.
What kind of mental gymnasts would say the wrong judgement gives better moves?? How does that make any logical sense?
I was saying you should always be positive and proactive and personal responsible and make moves in-the-small instead of thinking nothing can be done because the sky is falling.
Please stop with the "just be positive" answer to every mental health problem. We can stay "positive" and "hopeful" all we want, things are obviously getting worse and most of us don't have any real influence over the trend, which is the very thing that naturally causes depression in humans. Forcing oneself to smile won't change any of that.