Over the past year I've gotten interested in the steady decline of children's mental health. I haven't looked into it in any depth, though, so I was interested in a survey of the topic by Judith Warner in the Washington Post Magazine yesterday. First off, she takes on the possibility that the crisis is an outgrowth of the COVID-19 pandemic:
That’s an explanation that feels right, particularly if you’re one of the millions of parents trying to balance back-to-normal work expectations with the continued chaos of your school-age children’s lives. It feels especially right if you’re someone whose child, pre-pandemic, seemed basically fine (or fine enough) and then just … wasn’t.
But — as the shrinks say — feelings aren’t facts.
Bottom line: It's not COVID. The pandemic might have made things worse, but this problem has been growing for at least a decade. So how about smartphones and social media?
Theories as to why children’s mental health was so bad pre-covid abound. A prominent subset — popularized most notably by San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge’s 2017 Atlantic story, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” — blames technology. That theory — regretfully, I’m tempted to add, because it’s one of those ideas that, no matter how wrong, still feel perfectly right — has been extensively refuted.
So it's not down to tech. Here's another guess:
Then there’s the view that part of what we’re seeing is a greater awareness and openness about children’s mental health on the part of a new generation of parents, the first to grow up at a time when it was common for kids to be diagnosed with issues like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and to come of age in a world where celebrities talked publicly about their struggles with depression or addiction. But most experts feel that this hypothesis doesn’t tell the whole story. Beyond the research evidence, their gut-level take tells them that young people truly have become more anxious and despairing.
So there's more. But what? Warner stops there to tell the rest of her story, which is about politicizing mental health and other topics. In other words, we don't really have a good idea yet of why kids today seem to have much worse mental health problems than previous generations.
FWIW, one of the first things I do when I come across something like this is to see if it's worldwide or mainly an American phenomenon. This is hard to suss out, but a brief survey suggests that it's a problem in Europe too, though possibly not quite as severe. So whatever's causing it, it's something at least moderately universal in rich Western countries.
But what?
It would be nice to have a number on this. If greater "awareness" and more frequent diagnosis were responsible for, say, 90% of the purported increase, then technically, we could indeed accurately state this dynamic doesn't tell the "whole" story. But it would nonetheless explain the overwhelming bulk of it.
I was wondering if "we now have a pill for that" explains a lot of the increase.
Grieving over someone's death for over a year now qualifies as a psychological problem.
Part of me thinks this is completely artificial, and driven by mental health professionals increasing their domain by trying to categorize and pathologize what are perfectly normal thoughts and emotions. For example, the updated DSM adds "bereavement disorder" to the list of mental illnesses. If a loved one dies and you still feel sad after six months, you now have a diagnosable mental illness.
Another example of classification mission creep is that a growing portion of kids are now said to be "on the spectrum." "Spectrum" diagnoses are up 800% in the last decade or so and are accelerating rapidly. At this pace, in a decade a majority of kids will be considered "on the spectrum." Autism exists and can be a seriously debilitating condition, but once every kid is on the spectrum then the spectrum is useless as a category. Do we really have 8x the autism rate of 10 years ago, or is it partially a matter of pathologizing some normal variations in human behavior?
Self reinforcement. We feel it should be more common so it is more common. Plus the suggestion of more honesty is also a big part. We don't cover up children's suicides as we did in the past. Back in the 60s-80s suicide by car was very common but was always listed as simple car crash.
When I was growing up we were steeped in the common wisdom that Social Security was going bankrupt and wouldn't be there for us. Nowadays teens are confronted with climate disaster and realizing that those in power don't take it seriously. I know that makes me depressed now.