“What adults don’t get”
The United States is seeing an unprecedented crisis in teen mental health. Especially for girls, depression and suicide risk has steadily climbed in the past decade.
According to the Monitoring the Future annual survey, self-reported mental illness had declined for teen girls and boys from 1991-2011, then began a rapid climb beginning in the early 2010s. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found similar increase for suicide, with an 82 % increase from 2010-2020 for girls, and 34 % increase for boys. (Haidt, J. “The new CDC report show that Covid added little to teen mental health trends,” After Babel/Substack 16 Feb 2023)
What should our response be to this crisis in the lives of young people ? One thing is to perhaps begin to listen to what teens have to say.
From Craig Freshley’s “Good Group Decision” newsletter (May 2023):
“I recently ran a meeting specifically for people ages 16-24 to ask them their views of the world and what they wish adults better understood about their generation. The few adults in the room were sworn to silence; there to listen. The young people in the room said some things that broke my heart.”
Old solutions don’t work for today’s problems.
Older folks see “problem behaviors” among younger people and think they know the causes and therefore the solutions. They don’t. The causes are different today and a solution like kicking a kid off a team because of substance use disorder is entirely unhelpful for the kid and utterly ineffective at preventing substance use disorder.
These things (cell phone in hand) are robbing us of the life we could be having
The stuff on our cell phones is addictive and everyone knows it and greedy corporations are taking advantage of us. Not only are cell phones a huge distraction from “real life,” they enable isolation and cause us to fear actual human interactions. Sure, cell phones have some positive attributes, but only some.
Artificial processed food is adversely affecting us physically and mentally
We are a generation raised on highly synthetic food and there have been warnings for years about the harmful effects of too many chemicals in our diets. Is it any wonder that our mental and physical health seems to be in decline? Duh.
We are afraid of strangers and of institutions
We are a generation whose parents put fear into us. Someone might try to abduct you. Anyone could have a gun. Stranger danger. We avoid confrontation. Not only that, we have witnessed blatant injustices and double standards in our legal system and don’t trust that institutions will protect us.
We need realistic images of what we could become
Body images portrayed in the media, including social media, are crippling to those with most types of bodies. Most role models have unrealistic and idealistic lifestyles. Show me a path that I can take to success, given my body, my gender, and where I live.”
(Reprinted with permission)
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For the rest of this article, and resources on teen mental health, suicide and the role of social median and smartphones as causes:
2. “The new CDC report shows that Covid added little to teen mental health”,
Jon Haidt, After Babel/Substack 2/26/23.
3. After Babel: Using moral psychology to explain why so much is going wrong
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/?utm_campaign=subscribe-page-share-screen&utm_medium=web
4. Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report 2011-2021
YRBSS Data Summary & Trends | DASH | CDC
—Patrick Crouse