March 21, 2024 - 1:00pm
If you’d told me that anything positive would come of me being hospitalised as a danger to myself in the winter of 2007, I probably would’ve laughed at you. That is, if I’d still been capable of laughter. By then I had sunk into a suicidal depression and I was sure I wouldn’t be around much longer.
But, as I recovered, I learned about cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) — a deceptively simple practice in which one learns to recognise mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions that, when left unchecked, can make a person anxious and depressed. These include mental habits that are fairly self-explanatory, such as catastrophising and overgeneralising, but also some that take a little more explanation: negative filtering, for example, is seeing only the downside, and fortune-telling is believing that you can see the future — wherein, of course, you’re doomed.
A lot of the anxiety and depression that led to my condition in 2007 had to do with work. I became the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2006, and as a result I had a front-row seat to the absolute worst kinds of campus illiberalism emerging at the time. The problem became a lot worse when Gen Z started going to university in 2014, with students making arguments in favour of censorship, deplatforming speakers and scholars, and policies punishing microaggressions — all of which relied almost entirely on cognitive distortions to justify. Given my history, I could easily see how this shift in the campus climate would be a disaster not only for free speech, but also for mental health.
I told my friend, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, about it, and we started working on an article published in 2015 entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind” which we expanded into a 2018 book of the same name.
We predicted not only the coming explosion of major threats to free speech and academic freedom on campus, but also the concordant decline in young people’s mental health — all of which came from the same source. Now the data is in, and it shows that both the threat to campus free speech and the mental health crisis we saw coming was even worse than either of us expected.
Given this history, though, I was surprised to see Eric Kaufmann argue in UnHerd this week that the thesis of our work was primarily that the mental health crisis caused “wokeness”. While discussing Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, Kaufmann connects Haidt’s thesis that “smartphone use, hyper-parenting and social media [are] the culprits behind the mental health epidemic” with the “explosion of Left-wing illiberalism on campus” that we discuss in Coddling — as if to say that the mental health epidemic caused the illiberalism on campus.
In reality, our argument is almost precisely the opposite: the ideology that Tim Urban has dubbed “social justice fundamentalism”, otherwise known as “wokeness”, is inherently depressing. Our book argues that teaching others the habits of anxious people results in both a mental health crisis and illiberalism on campus. They work and emerge together: one doesn’t cause the other.
The data shows that ideology, race and gender are all statistically significant predictors of self-reported mental health, with liberals having the worst self-reported mental health compared to moderates and conservatives, and women having worse self-reported mental health than men. What’s more, the interaction between race, ideology, and gender is statistically significant — with liberal white and non-white women having the worst self-reported mental health. This trend has also been reported by Zach Goldberg and Haidt using Pew Research’s data, as well as findings from Gimbrone et al.
Using FIRE’s 2024 Campus Free Speech Rankings data, we’ve seen that 36% of students reported feelings of poor mental health more than half the time. Out of these 15,000 students, 67% were liberal, compared to just 16% moderate and 17.3% conservative. To put it simply, the more students were likely to believe in “social justice fundamentalism”, the more miserable they tended to be.
People seem to be waking up to the fact that our educational institutions have done something quite cruel by teaching the younger generation the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. But it isn’t too late. We can teach kids to recognise and overcome cognitive distortions rather than lean into and accept them. We can promote resilience and encourage young people to be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragile”. If we finally decide to do something about the dysfunctional mental habits we’ve given our kids and change course, maybe something good came out of my 2007 hospital stay after all.
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SubscribeIs the study weighted to represent equivalent numbers of ideological representation? Is a reason fewer moderates and conservatives report poor mental because there are fewer self-identifying moderates and conservatives in the cohort?
There are studies dedicated exactly to the difference between conservatives and what is loosely defined as “liberals”. And one could come to similar conclusions on the basis of anecdotal evidence, incl. personal observations.
Conservatives are more individualistic and self-reliant, they believe in individual responsibility rather than in the power of the collective (or “the masses”). They put a high value on having a family and as a result enjoy moral support from family members. They value working hard rather than relying on redistribution that would ensure “social justice”. Plus, working hard leads to a sense of achievement and (more often than not) is well rewarded financially.
All these undoubtedly are factors ensuring better mental health outcomes.
He gave percentages.
Author absolutely nails it here. The previous article by Kaufmann was clumsy and ill concieved, and seemingly geared to clickbait. Beyond the cynical references to wokeness there is a serious and rather sad state of affairs here – most students will mature beyond the trappings of social justice anx, but many may well having long lasting issues.
Is this the fault of educational institutions? Or just bad parenting? My own take is that there has been a cultural shift over the last several generations towards treating children like treasured house pets rather than adults-in-training. Every difference must be corrected with pharmaceuticals, wayward behavior is treated with therapy instead of discipline, and mental illness is part of young peoples individual self-identity.
I would also question Lukianoff and Haidt’s over-reliance on self diagnosis of mental illness. In a society where it is trendy for young people to be “neurodivergent”, wide spread claims of this or that mental problem is not surprising.
Great essay and excellent response. Maybe it’s a combination of all these including, social media etc.
Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people can be about mental health.
As a former Psychiatric Nurse, I might endorse that if it could be defined in clinical terms, which so far it has not.
Are you ever amazed by your own rudeness and arrogance, or are you desensitized now? 😉
I’m sometimes still a little shocked and impressed by how arrogant and rude I can be.
Gen Z is over-represented by self-obsessed, smug, righteous wusses who’ve been brainwashed by an education system that is utterly dominated by Marxist ideology and a Left Wing worldview. They’ve been encouraged to view themselves as victims of oppression by just about everything and everyone. They are the Neo Woking Class in the making who will ruthlessly cancel anyone or any organisation that does not conform to their orthodoxy.
!
Some children are treated worse than pets. Who would separate young puppies from their nurturing mother?
Gen Z ” mental health” issues on campus are largely due to pampering and cosseting by the lavish availability of ” Counseling” services.
When one studied in the UK several decades ago, and felt challenged by various circumstances, a good stroll down the riverside or a walk in the parks would revive one.
And humming ” Pick yourself up, Dust yourself off, start all over again”.
But I guess it’s a generation gap thing all over again!
And the fact that we had to write real essays and attend tutorials for being assessed, instead of cribbing about ” micro-aggression” and levelling other charges against teachers to ensure we got good grades.
Anxiety is a perfectly natural state for any ‘thinking’ young person, and probably essential in order to learn how to navigate one’s way in the world towards a meaningful and productive existence.
In a few cases, this can become overwhelming (as perhaps happened with the author) and restorative treatment is part of the route out. The lesson here is “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, but for the majority of young people who don’t topple over the edge, allowing themselves to be ‘killed’ or ‘deadened’ through inculcation by the misery industry needs to be overturned.
Articles such as this, and the “antifragile” concept are valuable and should help to turn the tables. There’s no such thing as “it’s too late” by the way. There never has been.
Sorry responded to the wrong comment and it won’t let me delete it.
“wokeness”, is inherently depressing
No kidding. When every step of your life is dictated by matters of identity and the relentless need to see the past through eyes of the present, that’s not going to be uplifting. A big part of the problem is how adults have failed the kids – no one told them on the occasions that warranted it to either shake it off, get over themselves, or accept that people unlike them exist. Instead, we have pathologized normal life events while simultaneously cheapening bona fide issues by ascribing terms like PTSD to things that are far from it.
Can’t we just say, “Snap out of it”?
Obviously you and many others here have never encountered or at least understood someone with depression.
Depression, the real thing, cannot be snapped out of. It is terrifying and destructive and a mental illness. But in time it normally goes.
Grief is not a mental illness but a sane response to tragedy, bereavement or marriage break up or suchlike. You can’t snap out of that either, but with love and time you can find joy again.
Sometimes the word depression is used for feeling a sad, worried or down when times are tough, when a child leaves home perhaps, you don’t get a job or are a skint. Normal responses to the problems of being, well, human. Not mental illness. Stop telling young people being sad is a mental health issue.
You might not be able to snap out of them easily but you can overcome them. And that makes you strong.
These people are not depressed, they are neurotic little mamma’s kids. I’ve been going to psych hospitals (cushy ones for the middle/upper classes so it’s not that) regularly for three decades. People with depression, the real deal aren’t at college. They aren’t capable. Neither are most people with other chronic, severe psychiatric illnesses. With the exception of the anorexics. Those overachieving girls are machines.
I think that at least some of these liberal young people are over exaggerating their mental health issues. Want people to surround you with love bombs when you’re fragile? Claim you’re anxious or depressed or some other mental illness. If a white (oppressor) student wants to be oppressed, they can claim to be trans or non-binary or one of the other six hundred genders. These kids are attention seekers. They are narcissists. It’s reached the point where a kid who is happy and well-adjusted is rare. If he or she wants friends, they will have to claim that they, too, are fragile. Or join the campus Republican club. And I’m saying this as a liberal.
I’m surprised at the negative reaction to this rebuttal. Comments on the distinction between parenting and educational institutions can only be pushed so far, as they are obviously related; blaming the young seems to be a habit in good standing after Covid. Rather with the evacuation of the transcendent, the epiphenominal seems as flimsy and meaningless as it is. The classic liberal project has morphed naturally into technocracy, and such a culture which redefines humanity in terms of tech will never be stable or offer security. It appears that the cost of limitless freedom appears limitless as well.
Well, I’m interested in how it pans out as universities will soon be bearing a lot more legal responsibility for the “well-being” of their precious students. Can tell you that counsellours and departments are bending over backwards to try and preempt the coming brownstuff storm. I say reap what you sow but reckon it will only increase the number of non-teaching staff (who are shepherding, counselling, listening, liaising, advocating, signposting, safeguarding, whatnot; God forbid you burden students with standards and expectations) and the further plummeting of the value of (a Western) university degree.
I’ve probably missed any discussion but are there any links between what students study and their mental health?
That is between those studying REAL subjects – physics, maths, geography (if that’s not too unsophisticated a word), languages (if there are any departments left), chemistry, engineering, medicine – all of which require boring learning and effort as opposed to NON-subjects for example political science, much philosophy (aren’t we all philosophers?), gender studies and so on?
Philosophy is very much a real subject – at least, as long as we’re not talking about the postmodernist excrement masquerading as philosophy. Philosophy is really conceptual engineering: the application of logic to abstracta, much as a construction engineer applies logic to pieces of wood and plastic and steel. A lot of physicists and mathematicians and other hard scientists are also bona fide philosophers.
It’s a thing of childhood, a bit of an emotional pissing contest. My Dad is bigger tahn your Dad, I twisted my ankle more than you did. A downward spiral of I have more mental health problems than you. It may reach a conclusion inevitably with death. Difficult to trump a death!
What is the influence of childcare from 0-2 on mental health and thus anxiety of young adults? Does the way mothers abandon children to daycare not have an influence on the development of wokism? Resilience and stress resistance seem to be linked with the presence of caring mothers. I wonder if it is not too late to change the neural circuits of the younger generation if they missed it at birth. Yes we can teach kids to overcome their anxiety and depression but would it not be better to prevent such deficits to happen from the start of their life?
There is a cultural shift happening since the 90ies. Never in the long history of the human species have children been systematically separated from their mother for such a long time. Modern western societies have adopted communist methods for raising children. The way we care for children and force young women to work and consume has its indicator: falling birth-rates. So what about dysfunctional mental habits of adults?
Thank you to Mr. Lukianoff for sharing his own experience of depression. He is on to something that most people don’t realize: mental stability is dynamic. It is not like a brick house that you build and forget about. It is more like standing on one foot: you have to use the feedback from your sensory feedback system (visual cues, inner ear cues, spino-cerebellar sensory pathways, cerebellar integration, etc.) to stay upright, and you have to keep rebalancing all the time: there is no stable equilibrium point. It never stops. For an extra challenge, try standing on one foot in the dark.
When it comes to mood and self-image, we all rely on a host of cues, many from our social surroundings and many from our interior experiences, along with our memories, and, importantly, the social expectations, which are largely unspoken or at best vaguely indicated. It is a nuanced balancing act with no clear lines or signs. And sometimes the social cues you receive are very de-stabilizing. I think that is where cognitive therapy comes in.
Feeling OK comes easily to some people, particularly those who are less introspective. As the social expectations propel everyone toward more questioning of whether they are OK, it is predictable that many will find themselves wanting. This, I think, is an important part of the doom-loop that Mr. Lukianoff is describing among the youth today.
In other words, I think it is appropriate to feel at the same time annoyed toward those adults who have promulgated the social tendencies toward over-judging oneself, and at the same time to feel tenderness toward the adolescents who have internalized those attitudes.
Even as emotional outbursts from those adolescents and young adults trigger an urge to slap them up the side of the head with a 2×4 (or in the UK, a 5×10).
Character Education. There used to be a belief, widely and deeply held, that the true purpose of education was to produce independent young adults, endowed with a moral compass, who would contribute to society and the greater good. It was understood that the young teemed with potential (good or ill), but required training, guiding and correcting, in order to to embed resilience and life-affirming patterns of thought. A liberal education aimed to equip people who could be free.
Much of this belief has ebbed away for various reasons. There is far greater emphasis on the acquisition of skills and knowledge and most critical enquiry is directed outwards towards societal structures rather than inwards towards the erroneous entitled self.
In response, there is now a self-conscious movement for Character Education. Search out the excellent work of the Jubilee Centre and support it.
https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/organisations/jubilee-centre-for-character-and-virtues