Is focusing too much on mental health making our kids more neurotic?
Astudent in my psychology class had not handed in a major paper so I asked him to meet me in my office to explain why he hadn’t turned in the critical assignment. A bit embarrassed, he explained he’d been depressed lately (he assured me he was not a danger to himself ). He told me that whenever he thought of working on the paper — a complicated research assignment — he got panic attacks and just couldn’t. I informed him that though I empathized with his situation, he couldn’t pass the class without turning it in. He ended
Self-reported mental health issues may reflect a kind of trendiness around some mental illness, wherein stigma has reversed to the point that reporting such conditions is outright incentivized.
up dropping the course.
I seem to be having these kinds of exchanges with distressed young college students more and more. It’s not just my impression. According to a KFF study, 1 in 5 teens surveyed reported feeling anxious or depressed in 2021 and 2022. Why this is remains an issue of considerable debate. Some politicians and scholars have argued this is due to social media and smartphones, but evidence for this belief remains weak. Perhaps other issues are at play.
In her new book “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” journalist Abigail Shrier suggests that the national focus on turning everything into therapy and trauma may be one root cause. Shrier focuses on mental health issues among teens, arguing that they are constantly probed for their feelings, coddled and shielded from the slightest adversity, incentivized to respond to negative events in immature ways, such as bringing minor disputes to authority figures rather than working them out, and constantly bombarded with messages implying they should feel traumatized by even minor provocations. Essentially, the more our society has become obsessed with mental health, the worse youth mental health has gotten.
Shrier presents a largely correlational case, though she does have a point. As a licensed psychologist and psychology professor, I think it’s important to make a distinction between empirically supported treatments for well-defined and diagnosed conditions versus pseudoscience therapies that do little other than reaffirm a person’s sense of grievance or pessimism. In some cases, empirically tested therapy may be offered under specific circumstances for a well-diagnosed mental health condition. Evidence suggests that this remains effective.
However, Shrier argues that in more recent years, clumsy mental health interventions have been poured like syrup over all children, often by teachers or advocates who are not licensed mental health professionals. By hypersensitizing everyone to always be on alert for their mental health, this may paradoxically but predictably make young people neurotic.
One example is social emotional learning, a trendy program in many American schools designed to teach kids to be more in touch with their feelings and be more empathic. This sounds great on the surface, but it tends to hyperfocus kids on emotions; randomized controlled trials of SEL have produced only weak evidence of their effectiveness. Given unimpressive positive results on academic performance, the potential for downstream negative impacts, such as failing to foster resilience and creating psychological pessimism, can’t be ignored.
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It’s important to recognize that this current mental health crisis appears to be a US phenomenon. Examining suicide data (which is the best tracker of mental health trends as it by definition requires no selfreport), we find that trends in Europe don’t show the same increase in suicide rates over time as recorded in the United States.
Self-reported mental health issues may reflect a kind of trendiness around some mental illness, wherein stigma has reversed to the point that reporting such conditions is outright incentivized. Schrier contends this may even be pushed by schools by obsessive programming on mental health “awareness.” Removing stigma from mental illnesses is valuable but outright incentivizing it is pernicious.
Of course, a complicated phenomenon such as teen mental health is never due to one single thing. There is currently a lot of intergenerational malaise in the United States. Teen mental health and adult mental health are undoubtedly intertwined; depressed teens often have depressed parents. But there is enough reason at this juncture to pull back from the fullthroated celebration and obsession with mental health and reconsider how best to help those in need without merely creating more neuroses.