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Is liberal society making us ill? Social contagions plague a vulnerable demographic

Why are girls so overrepresented in the disorders de jour? (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)


June 28, 2023   11 mins

As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, most of those with long Covid would be older men. But this is not so. According to a US Census Bureau survey, women are almost twice as likely as men to report having it, while transgender people are significantly more likely to do so than all other groups. A German study, meanwhile, concluded “there is accumulating evidence that adolescent girls are at particular risk of prolonged symptoms”.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.


Gurwinder Bhogal is a freelance writer. His work can be found at gurwinder.substack.com

G_S_Bhogal

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Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

The author articulates the mechanisms by which people approach their own agency, or capacity to control their own lives.

It’s my view that the complexity of life in developed societies has exceeded the cognitive capacity of a significant proportion of the population to be able to cope with

Do.people in general really prefer to be told what to do? The evidence from the pandemic is that perhaps, yes, they do. It may have come as an unpleasant surprise to many.

.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Yes that’s a good counterpoint to an excellent article. Evolution hasn’t equipped us to cope with constant bombardment by terrible events in the news and the distractions of social media.

Alan B
Alan B
1 year ago

“Evolution hasn’t equipped us to cope…”

Then why are so many able to do it?

Still, lockdown does point to the fly in the ointment here. I have been a “stoic” all my life, but lockdown was not under my control; neither was it a fact of nature, nor of perception. It’s getting harder every day to differentiate The Science from The Sadomasochism!

T M Murray
T M Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

Agreed. Why blame ‘evolution’ when the crux of the problem is that we have an uninformed public (thanks to the irresponsible and uncritical legacy media organisations). I believe that people make intelligent decisions when they have access to high quality information. We’re in an epistemic crisis.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  T M Murray

They also need access to having been taught to think; many people today can retain information but ccannot process it.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago
Reply to  T M Murray

No the don’t. They rely on their biases. There in not one scintila of proof that heaven exist but ppl believe it in mass.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  T M Murray

They also need access to having been taught to think; many people today can retain information but ccannot process it.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago
Reply to  T M Murray

No the don’t. They rely on their biases. There in not one scintila of proof that heaven exist but ppl believe it in mass.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

Lockdown WAS under your,anyone’s control. You didnt have to do it. Just ignore or. I did.
Like some others did now we know.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

Your answer applies to some things Jane, but we cannot just do as we please all the time.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Nice Ego.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Jane didn’t suggest doing as you please all the time. Just in this instance.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

That’s true. We have to judge for ourselves.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Nice Ego.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Jane didn’t suggest doing as you please all the time. Just in this instance.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

That’s true. We have to judge for ourselves.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

Your answer applies to some things Jane, but we cannot just do as we please all the time.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

I’m not convinced that we are well evolved to cope with the bombardment, which has only arrived in the last few years of our million year development. Many people do not exhibit outward signs of mental discord, but their brains might surely have been otherwise better utilised.

JJ Barnett
JJ Barnett
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

Many people do not exhibit outward signs of mental discord, but their brains might surely have been otherwise better utilised.

Yes, good point. Opportunity cost.
Whilst stronger individuals may handle the constant chaotic bombardment better than others, in a finite lifetime, that person’s attention and time may well have been far better spent if it wasn’t being sponged up by the chaos machine.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  JJ Barnett

There are many people who don’t listen/watch the news or do social media, and are blithly unaware of much that goes on. Ignorance is bliss?

Last edited 1 year ago by Clare Knight
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  JJ Barnett

There are many people who don’t listen/watch the news or do social media, and are blithly unaware of much that goes on. Ignorance is bliss?

Last edited 1 year ago by Clare Knight
JJ Barnett
JJ Barnett
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

Many people do not exhibit outward signs of mental discord, but their brains might surely have been otherwise better utilised.

Yes, good point. Opportunity cost.
Whilst stronger individuals may handle the constant chaotic bombardment better than others, in a finite lifetime, that person’s attention and time may well have been far better spent if it wasn’t being sponged up by the chaos machine.

JJ Barnett
JJ Barnett
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

On the evolution point, there has been work done on this specifically, and it seems that humans can manage up to about 100 social connections well.
Which doesn’t negate that fact that some human tribes were much larger than that, and that some of us today have many hundreds (or even thousands) of active friends, family and work relationships. But it seems that for most people that’s too much to manage, and as numbers of connections increase, the quality of those connections declines (as does satisfaction).
That makes sense. If you invite 1,000 people to your wedding, how much time are you spending with each, and are they really all your close connections, sharing an intimate experience with you? …on the other hand, if you had a wedding with 30 guests, it’s likely that the group connection and interaction would be very different, as would the power of the memories of the day, because depth of interaction is related to satisfaction and how much we ‘value’ certain people / relationships.
I would also posit that something similar may be true regarding our ability to process information (and make decisions, and take actions). Many great books have been written on this — the Paradox of Choice, and the observation that more choice can lead to less satisfaction — I won’t belabour that here. But take the news media environment; so much has changed in such a short time that it’s really astonishing that more people aren’t going a bit doolally, in my opinion.
I’m around 40yrs old. When I was in my teens the news would be switched on in the evenings for 30 mins or possibly an hour. Some days not at all, there were family things going on and no tv time. At the weekend the Saturday paper would arrive on the lawn in the morning, and be lightly perused and passed around by various family members over the course of Sat & Sun (front section for Dad; movie times pages for teens!). Most of this news, perhaps 80% of it, was local news. Things happening in our city or state. The remaining 20% or so would be ‘big’ stories, that were national news, or international news. So the world felt manageable in it’s size. We heard mainly about the things that affect us. We heard occasionally about a shocking murder, or a terrible natural disaster somewhere unimaginably far away.
Fast forward to now. We have a 24hr news cycle, run on a business model that must aggressively bid for your attention to drive ad revenues, which means provoking and sensationalising the stories. The barrier between local and global is gone. We are now saturated in the entire world’s scandals and miseries, multiple times a day. It’s like trying to drink from a firehose of chaos. I think it’s extremely emotionally destabilising for people, especially young people, to be bombarded with misery, disaster and hysterical narratives. It’s simply too much to manage. Many people can’t deal with it, and are subsumed in the madness, or radicalised, or pushed into depressive states (as the world just seems so awful, irreparably so).

Some people are strong enough to handle this, and have good filtering system, of sorts. But many people are clearly struggling to manage engaging with the whole world at once — it’s totally unmanageable. I don’t know how we solve this problem. This is the dark side of globalisation x the internet. It widened the frame from local to global, in a way that may be really bad for human mental health. Jaron Lanier has a few ideas on what to do, but almost nobody else is even talking about the problem, certainly not with any precision.

T M Murray
T M Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

Agreed. Why blame ‘evolution’ when the crux of the problem is that we have an uninformed public (thanks to the irresponsible and uncritical legacy media organisations). I believe that people make intelligent decisions when they have access to high quality information. We’re in an epistemic crisis.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

Lockdown WAS under your,anyone’s control. You didnt have to do it. Just ignore or. I did.
Like some others did now we know.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

I’m not convinced that we are well evolved to cope with the bombardment, which has only arrived in the last few years of our million year development. Many people do not exhibit outward signs of mental discord, but their brains might surely have been otherwise better utilised.

JJ Barnett
JJ Barnett
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan B

On the evolution point, there has been work done on this specifically, and it seems that humans can manage up to about 100 social connections well.
Which doesn’t negate that fact that some human tribes were much larger than that, and that some of us today have many hundreds (or even thousands) of active friends, family and work relationships. But it seems that for most people that’s too much to manage, and as numbers of connections increase, the quality of those connections declines (as does satisfaction).
That makes sense. If you invite 1,000 people to your wedding, how much time are you spending with each, and are they really all your close connections, sharing an intimate experience with you? …on the other hand, if you had a wedding with 30 guests, it’s likely that the group connection and interaction would be very different, as would the power of the memories of the day, because depth of interaction is related to satisfaction and how much we ‘value’ certain people / relationships.
I would also posit that something similar may be true regarding our ability to process information (and make decisions, and take actions). Many great books have been written on this — the Paradox of Choice, and the observation that more choice can lead to less satisfaction — I won’t belabour that here. But take the news media environment; so much has changed in such a short time that it’s really astonishing that more people aren’t going a bit doolally, in my opinion.
I’m around 40yrs old. When I was in my teens the news would be switched on in the evenings for 30 mins or possibly an hour. Some days not at all, there were family things going on and no tv time. At the weekend the Saturday paper would arrive on the lawn in the morning, and be lightly perused and passed around by various family members over the course of Sat & Sun (front section for Dad; movie times pages for teens!). Most of this news, perhaps 80% of it, was local news. Things happening in our city or state. The remaining 20% or so would be ‘big’ stories, that were national news, or international news. So the world felt manageable in it’s size. We heard mainly about the things that affect us. We heard occasionally about a shocking murder, or a terrible natural disaster somewhere unimaginably far away.
Fast forward to now. We have a 24hr news cycle, run on a business model that must aggressively bid for your attention to drive ad revenues, which means provoking and sensationalising the stories. The barrier between local and global is gone. We are now saturated in the entire world’s scandals and miseries, multiple times a day. It’s like trying to drink from a firehose of chaos. I think it’s extremely emotionally destabilising for people, especially young people, to be bombarded with misery, disaster and hysterical narratives. It’s simply too much to manage. Many people can’t deal with it, and are subsumed in the madness, or radicalised, or pushed into depressive states (as the world just seems so awful, irreparably so).

Some people are strong enough to handle this, and have good filtering system, of sorts. But many people are clearly struggling to manage engaging with the whole world at once — it’s totally unmanageable. I don’t know how we solve this problem. This is the dark side of globalisation x the internet. It widened the frame from local to global, in a way that may be really bad for human mental health. Jaron Lanier has a few ideas on what to do, but almost nobody else is even talking about the problem, certainly not with any precision.

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
1 year ago

You do exactly what the article says, blame outside forces. Maybe there is some truth to that, but it leads you to ignore what you CAN do and then into the pathology described.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Johnson

OK “Cope” was obviously the wrong word. Not sure what the right word is but the whole social media/24 hour global news deluge is entirely novel and we are only beginning to understand its effects. We can exercise personal responsibility (and abstain) until the cows come but we’ll still have to live with the fallout from those that don’t. And they are probably the future.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
1 year ago

You were right first time Simon – the incorrect word in this thread is “blame”. In pure factual terms, our brains have not needed to develop/operate the necessary filtering/coping mechanisms until very recently.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Barton
Ian Barton
Ian Barton
1 year ago

You were right first time Simon – the incorrect word in this thread is “blame”. In pure factual terms, our brains have not needed to develop/operate the necessary filtering/coping mechanisms until very recently.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Barton
Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Johnson

Yes walking with only a right foot makes a circle over and over again. One also has 2 sides in a brain. Don’t be so scared of the Left side.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Johnson

OK “Cope” was obviously the wrong word. Not sure what the right word is but the whole social media/24 hour global news deluge is entirely novel and we are only beginning to understand its effects. We can exercise personal responsibility (and abstain) until the cows come but we’ll still have to live with the fallout from those that don’t. And they are probably the future.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Johnson

Yes walking with only a right foot makes a circle over and over again. One also has 2 sides in a brain. Don’t be so scared of the Left side.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago

Can’t have progress without progressives.
Perhaps move the rock on top of you to move forward.

Alan B
Alan B
1 year ago

“Evolution hasn’t equipped us to cope…”

Then why are so many able to do it?

Still, lockdown does point to the fly in the ointment here. I have been a “stoic” all my life, but lockdown was not under my control; neither was it a fact of nature, nor of perception. It’s getting harder every day to differentiate The Science from The Sadomasochism!

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
1 year ago

You do exactly what the article says, blame outside forces. Maybe there is some truth to that, but it leads you to ignore what you CAN do and then into the pathology described.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago

Can’t have progress without progressives.
Perhaps move the rock on top of you to move forward.

Steve White
Steve White
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

What happens to you if you do hold to an unapproved position on something? You know, one different than what they tell you? Will you hear unapproved positions on Ukraine for example?
Will you hear them even on Unherd, or will it always only be about smaller issues that give the illusion of freedom? We’re free to vigorously debate if chicken or beef is better on the menu of the Titanic and we call that democracy, but if we dare mention the rising water levels on the lower decks and speak an unauthorized truth (aka fake news), well, we now know there are all kinds of paid agencies, and the full power, authority, and threat of our angry-at-us democratic government behind it.
The passive submission of the masses is a desired effect, and also a managed effect. The information is all managed, and so is what can be safely concluded. 
Just as God makes us only as free as our natures, and therefore we are not free to spread our wings and fly because we are not birds, so our Western governments only allow us to think as freely as the size and location of the overton window they manage over us. To do otherwise is not the path to safety or blessings.
They make that clear, and just like during Covid they encourage us and our neighbors to go after those who violate their wills.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve White
Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

The conservatives have more indoctrinating principles that ostracize people with other beliefs.
BTW which god ?
Allah or
perhaps Zeus the one who did the Virgin Mary.

Now see if you censor me !o!

Last edited 1 year ago by Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

The conservatives have more indoctrinating principles that ostracize people with other beliefs.
BTW which god ?
Allah or
perhaps Zeus the one who did the Virgin Mary.

Now see if you censor me !o!

Last edited 1 year ago by Mark M Breza
Gordon Black
Gordon Black
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

The human animal is a gregarious species, so obviously for most people, individual freedom is an illusion. A dangerous mythology when set against biology. Self awareness, especially knowing your place, is key to good ‘mental health’.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 year ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

The female species is.
The male species is not so much.
Unfortunately we’re condemned to existing in some form of essential but ultimately destructive symbiotic relationship so we have to try to get along.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 year ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

The female species is.
The male species is not so much.
Unfortunately we’re condemned to existing in some form of essential but ultimately destructive symbiotic relationship so we have to try to get along.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

You might like this lyric from the Fleet Foxes, a thoughtful hipstery American band, written in 2010:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.

A bit of Millennial maturity.

Narcissa Smith-Harris
Narcissa Smith-Harris
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

It would also be nice if a society promoted essays that dealt with facts. Or logic. If more men die of Covid then, by that very fact, more women will have long covid–because they will have survived it. Why more teenage girls? Because the young survive best.
I’d note you don’t get diagnosed with long covid if they don’t think you’ve had covid. Sure confirmation with doctor’s is a thing but it isn’t the entirety of the diagnosis. There are markers. Testable markers like inflammation. And here comes facts again, women tend to be more prone to auto-immune type disease than men. Something about our immune response can go haywire so it is entirely predictable that long covid would happen to women in greater numbers, even if more men weren’t too dead to get it.
But there are so many bald statements of sexism in this article that need to be addressed. The author seems to feel that self-reporting is the same as fact. It is not. Sure men say they are fine. And then they are 90% more violent both to others and themselves. Far from being happiest middle-aged white men, especially in conservative places, kill themselves at a far higher rate. You know who kills themselves least? Black women who are as a group about as liberal as they come.
Deaths of despair, dependence on social programs, poor education, poverty and broken families are all higher in those parts of the country which are conservative.
Meanwhile New York chugs along with purpose and drive, which tourists from other places will soon realize as they stand aimlessly in the middle of sidewalks while 8 million New Yorkers and a similar amount of commuters try get where they are going.
And that’s not even getting into the bizarre assertion that teen girls are more prone to social contagion. It is almost as if he hasn’t met a middle school, teen or college boy. Boys used to read, play outside, do drama, do anything. Now all they do is hang about on video games, swear at strangers and occasionally pick up an AK and kill classmates and strangers. Or join gangs. And kill neighbors and strangers. Which is so so much better.
Girls fret with their friends and go to college and other technical schools that will give them a future. It’s just such a passive, sick choice on the part of girls.
We should all be “healthy” like men.
I mean seriously dude? How can you say that with a straight face?

Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago

Suicide rates are actually higher in solid democratic states like N. Hampshire, and Vermont than in the deep South. Deaths of despair are primarily the impact of the dissolution of the social ties and institutions (church, family, community) which conservatives prize so highly.
Sociological research by Bradford Wilcox has shown that suicide rates are in fact higher in communities and social groups that have been deprived of these institutions. This is also evident in the reports of the commission for children at risk, which show a clear correlation between harmful behavior and social anomie.

Last edited 1 year ago by Spyros
Gordon Black
Gordon Black
1 year ago

Thank you for providing solid evidence backing up both Steve Murray’s and Gurwinder Bhogal’s conjectures.

T Bone
T Bone
1 year ago

Your errors here are not due to lack of intelligence but because you are viewing the world through a “Lens of Systemic Oppression.”

Try reading the article again assuming the author is citing statistics in good faith and then assess whether left-leaning politics promotes feelings of despair and hopelessness.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago

There have been a number of studies lately noting the high rate of depression in young women, particularly those who tend to lean liberal. Google it. My daughter, who I consider to be quite healthy has related to me on more than one occasion how stressful it is today even for her and others. She attributes it to social media and therefore has consciously tried to alter her behavior and perception of how it affects her personally. Depression among young women who tend to lean liberal, is actually ‘a thing’ .

Last edited 1 year ago by Cathy Carron
Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago

Suicide rates are actually higher in solid democratic states like N. Hampshire, and Vermont than in the deep South. Deaths of despair are primarily the impact of the dissolution of the social ties and institutions (church, family, community) which conservatives prize so highly.
Sociological research by Bradford Wilcox has shown that suicide rates are in fact higher in communities and social groups that have been deprived of these institutions. This is also evident in the reports of the commission for children at risk, which show a clear correlation between harmful behavior and social anomie.

Last edited 1 year ago by Spyros
Gordon Black
Gordon Black
1 year ago

Thank you for providing solid evidence backing up both Steve Murray’s and Gurwinder Bhogal’s conjectures.

T Bone
T Bone
1 year ago

Your errors here are not due to lack of intelligence but because you are viewing the world through a “Lens of Systemic Oppression.”

Try reading the article again assuming the author is citing statistics in good faith and then assess whether left-leaning politics promotes feelings of despair and hopelessness.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago

There have been a number of studies lately noting the high rate of depression in young women, particularly those who tend to lean liberal. Google it. My daughter, who I consider to be quite healthy has related to me on more than one occasion how stressful it is today even for her and others. She attributes it to social media and therefore has consciously tried to alter her behavior and perception of how it affects her personally. Depression among young women who tend to lean liberal, is actually ‘a thing’ .

Last edited 1 year ago by Cathy Carron
jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That’s more or less what I said!

Alison Wren
Alison Wren
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

The Miss Triggs problem……

Alison Wren
Alison Wren
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

The Miss Triggs problem……

Betsy Arehart
Betsy Arehart
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I agree about the complexity. Since the advent of the digital age into everyday life around the mid 90s (for me, the year 2000), life has become increasingly and insanely complex in my experience. I was age 45 in 2000, so I well remember the pre complex age.

Last edited 1 year ago by Betsy Arehart
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Arehart

Try being over 80!!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Arehart

Try being over 80!!

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

“Do.people in general really prefer to be told what to do? The evidence from the pandemic is that perhaps, yes, they do. It may have come as an unpleasant surprise to many.”

Certainly did. I told my wife ‘they’ll never accept that in Britain”. How wrong I was.

Suzanne C.
Suzanne C.
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Exactly my thinking about the complexity of life and the capacity of most people. These things seem to have crossed each other on a chart, the one steadily increasing, the other decreasing. I have one son who has a below average IQ and I am very worried about his future. He is a competent tradesman with an excellent work ethic and will always be employed, but the complexity of everything else, managing money, subscriptions and electronic payments, passwords, etc. increases daily. It feels as if most people live on the very edge of fiscal disaster.
No one addresses this very real problem the idea seems to be that life, like cars, will be self-driving.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Is that why cults & religion dumb one down to take control ?
“No, life is too hard, just follow our simple beliefs, don’t listen to all that other stuff; it is too complicated for you. We know what you need they don’t.”
Hey wait is Amerika a Cult now ?

Jane Hewland
Jane Hewland
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Sorry, I don’t agree with this. Life was infinitely more harrowing for poor families 150 years ago when multiple children within one family died in infancy. My great grandfather was a vicar, burying children every week in the East End. It was worse for our grandparents who were at war for six years with bombs raining down. Or how about the First World War and the millions who died in the trenches or the Spanish flu epidemic or the Great Depression. People didn’t just see this stuff on screen. It was their lives. We have suffered nothing remotely comparable. But we have lost important things that used to bind us together. We are adrift from our culture and our history, from appreciating the importance of family and community. But most important, we’ve abandoned our gods. Common beliefs are crucial to social cohesion and flourishing. No civilisation ever survived their loss.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Yes that’s a good counterpoint to an excellent article. Evolution hasn’t equipped us to cope with constant bombardment by terrible events in the news and the distractions of social media.

Steve White
Steve White
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

What happens to you if you do hold to an unapproved position on something? You know, one different than what they tell you? Will you hear unapproved positions on Ukraine for example?
Will you hear them even on Unherd, or will it always only be about smaller issues that give the illusion of freedom? We’re free to vigorously debate if chicken or beef is better on the menu of the Titanic and we call that democracy, but if we dare mention the rising water levels on the lower decks and speak an unauthorized truth (aka fake news), well, we now know there are all kinds of paid agencies, and the full power, authority, and threat of our angry-at-us democratic government behind it.
The passive submission of the masses is a desired effect, and also a managed effect. The information is all managed, and so is what can be safely concluded. 
Just as God makes us only as free as our natures, and therefore we are not free to spread our wings and fly because we are not birds, so our Western governments only allow us to think as freely as the size and location of the overton window they manage over us. To do otherwise is not the path to safety or blessings.
They make that clear, and just like during Covid they encourage us and our neighbors to go after those who violate their wills.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve White
Gordon Black
Gordon Black
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

The human animal is a gregarious species, so obviously for most people, individual freedom is an illusion. A dangerous mythology when set against biology. Self awareness, especially knowing your place, is key to good ‘mental health’.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

You might like this lyric from the Fleet Foxes, a thoughtful hipstery American band, written in 2010:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.

A bit of Millennial maturity.

Narcissa Smith-Harris
Narcissa Smith-Harris
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

It would also be nice if a society promoted essays that dealt with facts. Or logic. If more men die of Covid then, by that very fact, more women will have long covid–because they will have survived it. Why more teenage girls? Because the young survive best.
I’d note you don’t get diagnosed with long covid if they don’t think you’ve had covid. Sure confirmation with doctor’s is a thing but it isn’t the entirety of the diagnosis. There are markers. Testable markers like inflammation. And here comes facts again, women tend to be more prone to auto-immune type disease than men. Something about our immune response can go haywire so it is entirely predictable that long covid would happen to women in greater numbers, even if more men weren’t too dead to get it.
But there are so many bald statements of sexism in this article that need to be addressed. The author seems to feel that self-reporting is the same as fact. It is not. Sure men say they are fine. And then they are 90% more violent both to others and themselves. Far from being happiest middle-aged white men, especially in conservative places, kill themselves at a far higher rate. You know who kills themselves least? Black women who are as a group about as liberal as they come.
Deaths of despair, dependence on social programs, poor education, poverty and broken families are all higher in those parts of the country which are conservative.
Meanwhile New York chugs along with purpose and drive, which tourists from other places will soon realize as they stand aimlessly in the middle of sidewalks while 8 million New Yorkers and a similar amount of commuters try get where they are going.
And that’s not even getting into the bizarre assertion that teen girls are more prone to social contagion. It is almost as if he hasn’t met a middle school, teen or college boy. Boys used to read, play outside, do drama, do anything. Now all they do is hang about on video games, swear at strangers and occasionally pick up an AK and kill classmates and strangers. Or join gangs. And kill neighbors and strangers. Which is so so much better.
Girls fret with their friends and go to college and other technical schools that will give them a future. It’s just such a passive, sick choice on the part of girls.
We should all be “healthy” like men.
I mean seriously dude? How can you say that with a straight face?

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That’s more or less what I said!

Betsy Arehart
Betsy Arehart
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I agree about the complexity. Since the advent of the digital age into everyday life around the mid 90s (for me, the year 2000), life has become increasingly and insanely complex in my experience. I was age 45 in 2000, so I well remember the pre complex age.

Last edited 1 year ago by Betsy Arehart
Martin Smith
Martin Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

“Do.people in general really prefer to be told what to do? The evidence from the pandemic is that perhaps, yes, they do. It may have come as an unpleasant surprise to many.”

Certainly did. I told my wife ‘they’ll never accept that in Britain”. How wrong I was.

Suzanne C.
Suzanne C.
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Exactly my thinking about the complexity of life and the capacity of most people. These things seem to have crossed each other on a chart, the one steadily increasing, the other decreasing. I have one son who has a below average IQ and I am very worried about his future. He is a competent tradesman with an excellent work ethic and will always be employed, but the complexity of everything else, managing money, subscriptions and electronic payments, passwords, etc. increases daily. It feels as if most people live on the very edge of fiscal disaster.
No one addresses this very real problem the idea seems to be that life, like cars, will be self-driving.

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Is that why cults & religion dumb one down to take control ?
“No, life is too hard, just follow our simple beliefs, don’t listen to all that other stuff; it is too complicated for you. We know what you need they don’t.”
Hey wait is Amerika a Cult now ?

Jane Hewland
Jane Hewland
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Sorry, I don’t agree with this. Life was infinitely more harrowing for poor families 150 years ago when multiple children within one family died in infancy. My great grandfather was a vicar, burying children every week in the East End. It was worse for our grandparents who were at war for six years with bombs raining down. Or how about the First World War and the millions who died in the trenches or the Spanish flu epidemic or the Great Depression. People didn’t just see this stuff on screen. It was their lives. We have suffered nothing remotely comparable. But we have lost important things that used to bind us together. We are adrift from our culture and our history, from appreciating the importance of family and community. But most important, we’ve abandoned our gods. Common beliefs are crucial to social cohesion and flourishing. No civilisation ever survived their loss.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

The author articulates the mechanisms by which people approach their own agency, or capacity to control their own lives.

It’s my view that the complexity of life in developed societies has exceeded the cognitive capacity of a significant proportion of the population to be able to cope with

Do.people in general really prefer to be told what to do? The evidence from the pandemic is that perhaps, yes, they do. It may have come as an unpleasant surprise to many.

.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago

Conservatives tend to be more resilient because they tend to have a more coherent worldview. Liberals believe that the entire human experience (gender, social relationship etc) is socialy constructed, an artifice that is contingent to permanent change. Such worldview is a recipe for mental illness as it leads them to misconstrue and misunderstand the world around them and creates a permanent sense of grievance. Being a young Liberal means that you are waging constant war on reality.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

The Left’s striving for utopia and for the ever perfect world, instead of living in the present is exhausting them. They need to take a break from themselves. One side effect of all this striving is tendency towards narcissism which permeates our culture today.

Last edited 1 year ago by Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

The Left’s striving for utopia and for the ever perfect world, instead of living in the present is exhausting them. They need to take a break from themselves. One side effect of all this striving is tendency towards narcissism which permeates our culture today.

Last edited 1 year ago by Cathy Carron
Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago

Conservatives tend to be more resilient because they tend to have a more coherent worldview. Liberals believe that the entire human experience (gender, social relationship etc) is socialy constructed, an artifice that is contingent to permanent change. Such worldview is a recipe for mental illness as it leads them to misconstrue and misunderstand the world around them and creates a permanent sense of grievance. Being a young Liberal means that you are waging constant war on reality.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago

I’ve noticed amongst my own acquaintances that the more sedentary their lifestyle the more prone they are to pessimism and constant complaining. So I will always be grateful that I was forced to learn a sport at school – much as I may have resented it at the time. Those endorphins are the best anti-depressant there is.

John Dellingby
John Dellingby
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Hard to argue. I would also add isolation and loneliness to this too both within our own lives (an increasing lack of friends and acquaintances) but also within our communities too. How many of us talk to our neighbours regularly, have simple chats with each other about local things etc? Probably a lot less than we used to do.

Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

It would be very interesting to see a study that would analyse mental illness by factoring in ethnicity, religion, etc. I suspect that some minority communities might be doing better precisely because of their closely knit structures and religious/spiritual based understanding of the cosmos. I have a feeling that the decline of Christianity has something to do with the rise of mental illness. Christianity offered both an avenue for socialization through services, rituals and organisations (Sunday schools, study groups), and a coherent worldview.
Talking to and engaging with one’s neighbor does not come naturally to us, instead ideas of politeness, kindness, gentility and social solidarity are firmly based on a Christian worldview.
The decline of Christianity undermined the structures (family, community) that validate and sustain the individual and I very much doubt that the remedies (neo-stoicism, new age spirituality) offered in this article can fill this gap.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

I think this is very true although I would add that social cohesion, family and community have also been violently disrupted by the move from an agrarian to an industrial society.

My family and I are, however, not starving which is an eternal blessing

Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

This is true however Christianity did not lost its resonance due to industrialization. Indeed, in many cases it revived it and gave it a new sense of purpose, the Evangelical revival of the 1830’s-1840’s was often centered around urban working class communities.
The decline of Christianity in fact was ushered in and coincided with rapid de-industrialization and the advent of neoliberal economics and post-modernist philosophy. Real productive work was thus replaced by the ‘service’ sector and Christianity by a vague spirituality that allowed you to pick and choose the flavor of the week.
This shift has seriously harmed working people by removing a much necessary locus, which helped them to create and sustain a more grounded existence and way of life.

Last edited 1 year ago by Spyros
Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

Darwin and World War 1 didn’t exactly help I either. I was thinking more of John Clare the poet. He was uprooted from the village he grew up in and ‘moved’ elsewhere as a consequence of the enclosure acts I think. It drove him mad. Although to be fair there was perhaps also already a predilection within him.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

He found being denied access to fields and woods he could once roam in freely intensely disturbing.
I expect a lot of people felt that to some degree.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

Exactly. I miss my childhood where I could roam freely over the English countryside. There was no such thing as private property as there is here in the US, where one can get shot for trespassing.

Last edited 1 year ago by Clare Knight
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

Exactly. I miss my childhood where I could roam freely over the English countryside. There was no such thing as private property as there is here in the US, where one can get shot for trespassing.

Last edited 1 year ago by Clare Knight
jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

He found being denied access to fields and woods he could once roam in freely intensely disturbing.
I expect a lot of people felt that to some degree.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

The choice hasn’t really been removed. It is the state that has continually played down christianity but it isn’t really a political thing. It’s thriving in those who practice it even though they find themselves in a monority.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

But it’s been neutralized as a political force. A force for social justice. Which it very much was used as in the 19th.C.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

But it’s been neutralized as a political force. A force for social justice. Which it very much was used as in the 19th.C.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

But that great early 19th C evangelical movement was a response by working people to their terrible,dreadful,awful conditions,it was an intelligent form of self-help and created a structure through which to operate,and to.become a cohesive force to demand and get better wages, conditions and respect
That’s why THEY (whoever they are) sought to bring down and destroy faith because it gives it’s adherents a communal power.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

Darwin and World War 1 didn’t exactly help I either. I was thinking more of John Clare the poet. He was uprooted from the village he grew up in and ‘moved’ elsewhere as a consequence of the enclosure acts I think. It drove him mad. Although to be fair there was perhaps also already a predilection within him.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

The choice hasn’t really been removed. It is the state that has continually played down christianity but it isn’t really a political thing. It’s thriving in those who practice it even though they find themselves in a monority.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

But that great early 19th C evangelical movement was a response by working people to their terrible,dreadful,awful conditions,it was an intelligent form of self-help and created a structure through which to operate,and to.become a cohesive force to demand and get better wages, conditions and respect
That’s why THEY (whoever they are) sought to bring down and destroy faith because it gives it’s adherents a communal power.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

“Talking to and engaging with our neighbors does not come naturally to us”. Who is the “Us?”. Speaking for myself it comes very naturally to me. Perhaps you’re one of the neighbors who wouldn’t respond!!

Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

This is true however Christianity did not lost its resonance due to industrialization. Indeed, in many cases it revived it and gave it a new sense of purpose, the Evangelical revival of the 1830’s-1840’s was often centered around urban working class communities.
The decline of Christianity in fact was ushered in and coincided with rapid de-industrialization and the advent of neoliberal economics and post-modernist philosophy. Real productive work was thus replaced by the ‘service’ sector and Christianity by a vague spirituality that allowed you to pick and choose the flavor of the week.
This shift has seriously harmed working people by removing a much necessary locus, which helped them to create and sustain a more grounded existence and way of life.

Last edited 1 year ago by Spyros
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

“Talking to and engaging with our neighbors does not come naturally to us”. Who is the “Us?”. Speaking for myself it comes very naturally to me. Perhaps you’re one of the neighbors who wouldn’t respond!!

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Spyros

I think this is very true although I would add that social cohesion, family and community have also been violently disrupted by the move from an agrarian to an industrial society.

My family and I are, however, not starving which is an eternal blessing

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Bit difficult to have a simple conversation if that neighbour reacts to you with an offended stare then resolutely looks away with pursed lips. That’s my neighbours. All my life. So I think the problem lies with me.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

It’s not you- it’s them.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Cathy Carron

Well you don’t really know for a fact who’s fault it is. I think with the right amount of social skills most people will respond in a posititve way, unless they’re paranoid, in which case one wouldn’t want to have them in one’s life anyway.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Cathy Carron

I wish that was true!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Cathy Carron

Well you don’t really know for a fact who’s fault it is. I think with the right amount of social skills most people will respond in a posititve way, unless they’re paranoid, in which case one wouldn’t want to have them in one’s life anyway.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Cathy Carron

I wish that was true!

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

It’s not you- it’s them.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Yes, community is a wonderful thing. That was half the attraction for church gorers.

Spyros
Spyros
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

It would be very interesting to see a study that would analyse mental illness by factoring in ethnicity, religion, etc. I suspect that some minority communities might be doing better precisely because of their closely knit structures and religious/spiritual based understanding of the cosmos. I have a feeling that the decline of Christianity has something to do with the rise of mental illness. Christianity offered both an avenue for socialization through services, rituals and organisations (Sunday schools, study groups), and a coherent worldview.
Talking to and engaging with one’s neighbor does not come naturally to us, instead ideas of politeness, kindness, gentility and social solidarity are firmly based on a Christian worldview.
The decline of Christianity undermined the structures (family, community) that validate and sustain the individual and I very much doubt that the remedies (neo-stoicism, new age spirituality) offered in this article can fill this gap.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Bit difficult to have a simple conversation if that neighbour reacts to you with an offended stare then resolutely looks away with pursed lips. That’s my neighbours. All my life. So I think the problem lies with me.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Yes, community is a wonderful thing. That was half the attraction for church gorers.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Not just sport but any hobby. Too much time spent navel gazing or scrolling through social media or channel surfing. No sense of achievement or accomplishment leads to low self esteem and feelings of worthlessness.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

That’s nonsense. Ive never achieved or accomplished anything in my life but I have a quite unjustified high self esteem. I try to be humble but when you are naturally arrogant and conceited that old ego bounces right back. The monster within. Seriously this is a very USA and very damaging notion. The American Dream. Every one is unique. Every one is a star. You just have to work hard and your dreams will come true. But you can’t just be ordinary,that’s not good enough. Until you’re a movie or a rock.star you haven’t really made it. That idea destroys a lot of American people. For an honest and truthful picture of the harmful side of The American Dream.i recommend this book – Sea of the Unknown by Jay.Swanson.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

I never said any of that. However I stand by having a hobby. I enjoy knitting and macrame. It’s hardly Rock star or fame worthy but each piece I complete reminds me that I can do what I put my mind to and I keep my mind busy. I don’t share it on social media for adulation because I don’t need that. Yet I know many people who do nothing and find the notion of trying to be frightening for fear of failure paralyses them. They tend to suffer from boredom and bitterness in equal measure.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

So we’re all different. One can’t generalize. There are so many different factors to be taken into consideration.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Dear Lindsay,I really took your last words as a starting point and went off in a different direction. I’m sorry if I upset you. I was a bit tactless. I make patchwork tote bags and yes,as I complete them and they are beautiful -and sturdy,I do have a sense of achievement. I’ve made hundreds by now but it was only in the last 3 years that I started phtographing each batch so I have a photo book record. I took,don’t post them on social media. But I feel my point still holds. In media terms I’m not “validated” as no one knows about my artistic activity. The media version of “my story” would be that one of my creations “goes viral” and within days I’ve made a fortune and am wealthy and “successful”. Except I’ve learned as have many others including Mr Swanson whose book is worth reading, thats SEA OF THE UNKNOWN by JAY SWANSON available on Amazon,that just producing something good on its own..no,all those creators who “just happened” to get discovered. Nah. It doesn’t happen. Your creation has to be placed,promoted,given a narrative,the RIGHT celebrity has to endorse it,it’s very interesting to get an insight into how it works. Next time I read about a 5 year girl who stated baking cup cakes for her 95 year old neighbour and only six weeks later is CEO of a healthy thriving business….

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

So we’re all different. One can’t generalize. There are so many different factors to be taken into consideration.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Dear Lindsay,I really took your last words as a starting point and went off in a different direction. I’m sorry if I upset you. I was a bit tactless. I make patchwork tote bags and yes,as I complete them and they are beautiful -and sturdy,I do have a sense of achievement. I’ve made hundreds by now but it was only in the last 3 years that I started phtographing each batch so I have a photo book record. I took,don’t post them on social media. But I feel my point still holds. In media terms I’m not “validated” as no one knows about my artistic activity. The media version of “my story” would be that one of my creations “goes viral” and within days I’ve made a fortune and am wealthy and “successful”. Except I’ve learned as have many others including Mr Swanson whose book is worth reading, thats SEA OF THE UNKNOWN by JAY SWANSON available on Amazon,that just producing something good on its own..no,all those creators who “just happened” to get discovered. Nah. It doesn’t happen. Your creation has to be placed,promoted,given a narrative,the RIGHT celebrity has to endorse it,it’s very interesting to get an insight into how it works. Next time I read about a 5 year girl who stated baking cup cakes for her 95 year old neighbour and only six weeks later is CEO of a healthy thriving business….

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

I get what you’re saying about America, Jane. However I do think that tends to be a coastal thing that doesn’t hold true for middle America.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

Thank you. As a Brit I really only see America through the (lying ) media. I know most USA people are lovely but something is gone very wrong with their political set up.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

Thank you. As a Brit I really only see America through the (lying ) media. I know most USA people are lovely but something is gone very wrong with their political set up.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

I never said any of that. However I stand by having a hobby. I enjoy knitting and macrame. It’s hardly Rock star or fame worthy but each piece I complete reminds me that I can do what I put my mind to and I keep my mind busy. I don’t share it on social media for adulation because I don’t need that. Yet I know many people who do nothing and find the notion of trying to be frightening for fear of failure paralyses them. They tend to suffer from boredom and bitterness in equal measure.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  jane baker

I get what you’re saying about America, Jane. However I do think that tends to be a coastal thing that doesn’t hold true for middle America.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

That’s nonsense. Ive never achieved or accomplished anything in my life but I have a quite unjustified high self esteem. I try to be humble but when you are naturally arrogant and conceited that old ego bounces right back. The monster within. Seriously this is a very USA and very damaging notion. The American Dream. Every one is unique. Every one is a star. You just have to work hard and your dreams will come true. But you can’t just be ordinary,that’s not good enough. Until you’re a movie or a rock.star you haven’t really made it. That idea destroys a lot of American people. For an honest and truthful picture of the harmful side of The American Dream.i recommend this book – Sea of the Unknown by Jay.Swanson.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Not everyone is able bodied. To say that exercise is the remedy for what ails society is very simplistic.

John Dellingby
John Dellingby
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Hard to argue. I would also add isolation and loneliness to this too both within our own lives (an increasing lack of friends and acquaintances) but also within our communities too. How many of us talk to our neighbours regularly, have simple chats with each other about local things etc? Probably a lot less than we used to do.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Not just sport but any hobby. Too much time spent navel gazing or scrolling through social media or channel surfing. No sense of achievement or accomplishment leads to low self esteem and feelings of worthlessness.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Not everyone is able bodied. To say that exercise is the remedy for what ails society is very simplistic.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago

I’ve noticed amongst my own acquaintances that the more sedentary their lifestyle the more prone they are to pessimism and constant complaining. So I will always be grateful that I was forced to learn a sport at school – much as I may have resented it at the time. Those endorphins are the best anti-depressant there is.

Peter Kwasi-Modo
Peter Kwasi-Modo
1 year ago

Great article: thanks! In addition to all those mentioned in the article, the UK has yet another factor that amplifies the prevalence of these disorders: a dysfunctional welfare system.

Peter Kwasi-Modo
Peter Kwasi-Modo
1 year ago

Great article: thanks! In addition to all those mentioned in the article, the UK has yet another factor that amplifies the prevalence of these disorders: a dysfunctional welfare system.

Dylan Thwaites
Dylan Thwaites
1 year ago

One of the best articles ever published by unherd. Some fundamental truths backed by evidence.

Dylan Thwaites
Dylan Thwaites
1 year ago

One of the best articles ever published by unherd. Some fundamental truths backed by evidence.

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
1 year ago

Nice article, well-written. It reminds me of an episode which occurred when I was working in Further Education colleges in the 1990s. We ran an “Access to H.E.” course, for people (mainly women) who were given a “second bite at the cherry” if they had missed out on university at 18.
From the early 1990s, there was a lot of money spent on computers, and lots of articles and courses on how education could be a lot more productive with an online component, and how all learners now needed to use I.T.. But a couple of students couldn’t get on with computers; it took them ages to learn basics like file management, etc., and they said that they couldn’t read text on the screen. Words “jumped around” as is sometimes reported by people with dyslexia, and some said that scrolling up and down made them feel physically ill.
More students (all women, as it happened) complained of this, and there were complaints and panic attacks. The term “computer blindness” or “screen blindness” was heard, and Ed. Psych. assessments started mentioning the phenomenon, along with recommendations that some sufferers needed an amanuensis to read and input text, special screens, and more time for exams and assessments.
In the mid 1990s, mobile phones became popular, and I remember 1997 as the year when every last student seemed to have one. If you didn’t have one, you missed out on a lot of novelty fun, and indeed became something of an outcaste. We then realised that “screen blindness” had quietly but entirely disappeared.

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
1 year ago

Nice article, well-written. It reminds me of an episode which occurred when I was working in Further Education colleges in the 1990s. We ran an “Access to H.E.” course, for people (mainly women) who were given a “second bite at the cherry” if they had missed out on university at 18.
From the early 1990s, there was a lot of money spent on computers, and lots of articles and courses on how education could be a lot more productive with an online component, and how all learners now needed to use I.T.. But a couple of students couldn’t get on with computers; it took them ages to learn basics like file management, etc., and they said that they couldn’t read text on the screen. Words “jumped around” as is sometimes reported by people with dyslexia, and some said that scrolling up and down made them feel physically ill.
More students (all women, as it happened) complained of this, and there were complaints and panic attacks. The term “computer blindness” or “screen blindness” was heard, and Ed. Psych. assessments started mentioning the phenomenon, along with recommendations that some sufferers needed an amanuensis to read and input text, special screens, and more time for exams and assessments.
In the mid 1990s, mobile phones became popular, and I remember 1997 as the year when every last student seemed to have one. If you didn’t have one, you missed out on a lot of novelty fun, and indeed became something of an outcaste. We then realised that “screen blindness” had quietly but entirely disappeared.

R MS
R MS
1 year ago

Excellent article.
I’m not sufficiently up on the data to critique it properly but this is thoughtful, credible, intelligent and well-researched writing on an important issue. It should be a spur to further debate and investigation.
I’ve followed Gurwinder on his sub stack and twitter for a while and am really pleased Unherd has offered him a piece. More please.
He is exactly the sort of intelligent writer operating outside the tramlines of familiar narratives we need to hear more of, and is centrally what Unherd should be about.

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
1 year ago
Reply to  R MS

Thanks, R MS. I checked out his substack, and you are right. Not only bright and clear, but seems like a decent moral person. Bookmarked!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  R MS

And so what what was the solution?

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
1 year ago
Reply to  R MS

Thanks, R MS. I checked out his substack, and you are right. Not only bright and clear, but seems like a decent moral person. Bookmarked!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  R MS

And so what what was the solution?

R MS
R MS
1 year ago

Excellent article.
I’m not sufficiently up on the data to critique it properly but this is thoughtful, credible, intelligent and well-researched writing on an important issue. It should be a spur to further debate and investigation.
I’ve followed Gurwinder on his sub stack and twitter for a while and am really pleased Unherd has offered him a piece. More please.
He is exactly the sort of intelligent writer operating outside the tramlines of familiar narratives we need to hear more of, and is centrally what Unherd should be about.

J Mo
J Mo
1 year ago

I don’t dispute that women and girls are more prone to anxiety disorders and social contagion than men. However, I’m wary of replacing one totalizing and obscuring explanation (long COVID) with another (modern society needs CBT to combat its delusions). I think something like long COVID is a good example of how something that existed before, like post viral syndrome, has been reinterpreted and repackaged as a new phenomenon. Ironically, women’s greater propensity to long COVID might be explained by their propensity to auto immune conditions, which has been linked by some to their sexed biology. No need to put them in the same camp as transgender, here! Just an alternative suggestion; for me, this article came off increasingly as articulating a “theory of all things”

Narcissa Smith-Harris
Narcissa Smith-Harris
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

A lot of our statements come how we choose define things. We define girls as having anxiety but not boys–and yet young men are exponentially more likely to murder someone or get in a fight. Often over nothing. Stupid stuff. How is that not just a function of anxiety but given permission to release itself in violence?
The social contagion thing, I don’t even know where anyone gets that. Compare sororities and fraternities. Fraternities will commit crimes. Sororities will maybe be mean to a girl or two. Conservatives among others are constantly worrying about boys without fathers–because they will find fathers in bad places, like gangs. Girls without fathers seem to cope. Even girls without mothers, cope. Because girls friendship groups offer more.
So how is this NOT defined as social contagion. How is this not defined as social contagion?
It is far more dangerous to society. It interferes the boys becoming useful members of society later–as these anxieties don’t with girls. Of all my daughter’s friends with various anxieties, not one isn’t going on to college or technical school. Only money adjusts their expectations. I can’t say the same for the boys my son knew growing up. Most were college bound but they have more issues.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 year ago

Girls without fathers, on average, mature sooner, are more promiscuous, hook up with the wrong young men, and have a higher chance on becoming young unwed mothers.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  William Shaw

That sounds like a huge generalization!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  William Shaw

That sounds like a huge generalization!

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago

“ Girls without fathers seem to cope.”

Narcissa, with the utmost respect to your experiences as a woman, you have got to be f***ing joking. Seeing a young woman happily in the company of her father is a beautiful thing and utterly precious to civilisation. Men who are raised without fathers are a danger to society but girls without fathers are an utter menace.

Every young man listens to young women bemoaning the horrors of female society, the cruelty and sadism of womankind.

Women enjoy higher education because it has been taken over by women and shaped to their interests and inclinations.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Albert McGloan

Oh good grief, another generalization. One can have a father but not a very good one, so that may be worse than not having one at all.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Albert McGloan

Oh good grief, another generalization. One can have a father but not a very good one, so that may be worse than not having one at all.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 year ago

Girls without fathers, on average, mature sooner, are more promiscuous, hook up with the wrong young men, and have a higher chance on becoming young unwed mothers.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago

“ Girls without fathers seem to cope.”

Narcissa, with the utmost respect to your experiences as a woman, you have got to be f***ing joking. Seeing a young woman happily in the company of her father is a beautiful thing and utterly precious to civilisation. Men who are raised without fathers are a danger to society but girls without fathers are an utter menace.

Every young man listens to young women bemoaning the horrors of female society, the cruelty and sadism of womankind.

Women enjoy higher education because it has been taken over by women and shaped to their interests and inclinations.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

They wanna stay home. Thats not bad. It’s natural. End of story.

Laura Kelly
Laura Kelly
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

I have to agree. I have a minor autoimmune condition that flares and remits at intervals. During a flare, I’m not actually in too much pain, but I feel very tired and, yes, depressed and anxious. When my condition remits, I get bright and energetic. So my point is that young women are prone to autoimmune conditions that may not be properly diagnosed for decades and some of the disproportionate mental illness we seem to suffer could have a physical cause. Autoimmune inflammation can affect the brain.

Narcissa Smith-Harris
Narcissa Smith-Harris
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

A lot of our statements come how we choose define things. We define girls as having anxiety but not boys–and yet young men are exponentially more likely to murder someone or get in a fight. Often over nothing. Stupid stuff. How is that not just a function of anxiety but given permission to release itself in violence?
The social contagion thing, I don’t even know where anyone gets that. Compare sororities and fraternities. Fraternities will commit crimes. Sororities will maybe be mean to a girl or two. Conservatives among others are constantly worrying about boys without fathers–because they will find fathers in bad places, like