Why are Kids Suffering so Much?

Liberal technocrats and social conservatives both offer just-so stories and flawed answers to the "youth mental health crisis."

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living - Karl Marx

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Each new survey of America’s youth reflects the same unnerving trend: kids these days are not doing OK. Compared to teen boys, teen girls report especially high rates of sadness, hopelessness, depression and anxiety. In addition, teen girls report high levels of sexual violence committed against them.

New results from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which measures teen attitudes, finds more of what we already knew: The kids aren’t doing so hot. Whenever these new data are released, the result is much the same: Much ink is spilled by adults trying to clear up the murky waters of the teenage psyche. In doing so, they seem to forget that they were teens once, too.

The adults in the room see all this bad stuff, and immediately start reacting in ways that reminds me: Oh, yeah, adults create the world that kids live in. And, frankly, this world they made sorta sucks for kids. It’s not that much of a stretch to conclude that (American) kids are unhappy because they live in an unhappy world.

What I think is missing from all these reactions is the fact that the world isn’t really working all that great for lots of people, not just kids. If the chattering classes aren’t fretting about the “youth mental health crisis” then they’re wondering why lower-income white people in rural areas are dying en masse from drinking, drugs, and suicide (re: despair). Or they forget that they themselves are unhappy! More and more middle-aged Americans are stressed and struggle with their own physical and mental health than ever.

It makes no sense to carve out and isolate teenage suffering from the rest of us. We’re all on this sinking ship together.

Symptoms vs Disease

The center-right and center-left commentators, pundits, and chattering classes constantly miss the mark when they discuss “mental health” from their high perches.

There’s the liberals, like Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, who recently framed teen suffering as a “tragic mystery” and dimissed outright that economics could be a culprit in anyway whatsoever. Thompson wrote:

“Big-picture economic trends don’t have much explanatory power either: In the period when teen anxiety increased, joblessness, poverty, and child hunger mostly declined, and real disposable income mostly grew.” (emphasis mine)

C’mon man: Poverty and hunger mostly declined? Real disposable income mostly grew? The fact is, poverty and hunger still exist at staggering levels a lot of American kids. As for income and wages, people get paid less and less for more and more work.

For over 50 years now wages have remained stagnant, especially for young people. For us Millennials—who don’t forget, are fully-grown adults now!—we went to all the right schools, did all of our stupid homework, took all those tedious tests, and the vast majority of us are still never going to make as much money as our parents did. The lucky millennial is stuck waiting around for The Great Wealth Transfer (re: inheritance).

It dawned on us millennials a long time ago that our lives will not be as good as our parents’ lives. We won’t make as much money. We won’t own as much real estate or cars. Doesn’t that account for some aspect of this “mental health crisis”? Not for Thompson.

So let’s hear out the intellectual social conservative, like NYT’s Ross Douthat, who blames secular “social liberalism.” On its face this doesn’t hold up either. Douthat defines social liberalism by “social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use and more.’”

If we’re to take the Youth Risk Survey data seriously, then we can also see that kids are not remotely following these trends Douthat finds so loathesome. Kids have less sex than they used to, have fewer sexual partners, and teen pregenancies are at historic lows. Kids also drink less, use drugs less, and smoke less tobacco than they used to. How could this be the case be if social liberalism had gone wild on a never-ending spring break?

Some point to the overdose crisis as the sign of a failing libertine society that let everyone do as much drugs as they want. The truth is that while teens use less drugs, more of them are dying from overdoses because of a chaotic and volatile drug supply that is far more deadly than it used to be. Teens have always experimented with drugs, and it’s only recently that a lot of them started dying from it thanks to the advent of illicit fentanyl.

Teenagers use drugs less, but more are dying from overdoses

I’ll give Douthat some credit for bringing something important about society our society into the picture: Unbridled individualism and society’s celebration of the self is certainly in the stew of our modern malaise. I think these trends have something to do with why we’re a lonely, unhappy society today.

I think missing from the mainstream inquiry into the “mental health crisis” are voices like Malcolm Harris, a Marxist who wrote the book on millennnials: Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials; and scholars like Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A., who wrote an excellent essay for NYT Opinion that reframes the very notion of a “mental health crisis.”

“Are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?”

For liberal technocrats like Thompson, they think credentialed experts can ascertain the correct empirical answer to problems that are, in fact, deeply structural in nature and stem from the infrastructure governing the baseline and bedrock conditions of life. For Carr or Harris, social media and tech are more downstream of the actual engines of suffering.

Take Preident Biden’s mental health agenda, which prioritizes “creating healthy environments” and name checks the “deteriminants of behavioral health” but also makes that same mistake. Carr writes:

“But then the plan goes on to focus on several proposals aimed at regulating social media platforms — a strange target that seems relevant only in a downstream way from major infrastructural determinants of health, like wealth inequality and public services — until you remember that it’s one of the few policy goals that both Democrats and Republicans share.”

Regulating Big Tech might be a good thing to do and might help some people who have a really toxic relationship with social media. But such tinkering leaves much of the conditions driving suffering untouched. For Carr and Harris, the causes, conditions and solutions to the “mental health crisis” are more straight up political. They’re not technological or even medical. It’s social and it’s political.

Social and political fixes are not so palatable to those who are in political power. Carr uses diabetes as an effective illustration of what I mean here:

“We all readily acknowledge that for diseases with a very clear biological basis like diabetes and hypertension, an individual’s body is only part of the causal reality of the disease. Treating the root cause of the ‘epidemic’ of diabetes effectively, for example, would happen at the level of serious infrastructural changes to the available diet and activity levels of a population, not by slinging medications or pouring funding into clinics that help people make better choices in supermarkets filled with unregulated, unhealthy food.”

Similarly, Harris writes that, “When it’s framed as a ‘youth mental health’ crisis, the solutions are individual, one malfunctioning brain at a time, even as the issue is obviously social.” When we medicalize diabetes, the solution lies in individual diets and lifestyles. When we medicalize youth mental health, the problem is iPhones and social media breaking one brain at a time.

But aren’t all of these problems cut from the same cloth? Corporations get to decide which cheap processed unhealthy junk they put on the shelves; social media companies get to hire the same freaks who design slot machines to create an addictive product that steals our attention and keeps us at home scrolling alone — unleashing all of this on society without any oversight? Zuckerberg writes a manifesto about how wonderful it would be to connect people all around the globe through his technology. It’s not like he ever stopped to think, wait, would this actually be a good thing? No, he’s got a business to run and a product (our data) to sell.

Sorry if it feels like I’m getting off track here a bit. I haven’t written a lot lately because I either got food poisoning or some sort of stomach bug. Brain’s not firing on all cylinders. I’m saying: the world that we’ve created isn’t a particularly good one.

If kids, adults, everbody, are suffering from a “mental health crisis,” why can’t that mean the most obvious and basic and no shit sherlock cause is: We aren’t happy!

We are unhappy

America isn’t exactly a nation of happy go lucky adults. Who teaches children how to be people? It’s adults! We do.

Kids learn from their parents and families what normal is, what the rules of life are, and, most importantly, how to navigate relationships with others. We’re a nation that’s been reeling and ping-ponging from one disaster to the next, from recurring financial recessions and bubbles to 20 year multi-trillion dollar wars to cascading ecological calamities to social and civil upheavels. Wouldn’t all this destruction and dysfunction at some point start to, I dunno, bleed into how parents raise their kids in their own homes?

Even though crime is nowhere near what it used to be in cities like New York, Upper East Side parents still won’t let their kids take the subway anymore. These adults probably forgot that it was a rite of passage for them to hop on the train and explore their city without parents. In high school, my friends and I would take the Yellow Line (the Skokie Swift baby!) into the city, transfer to the Red Line and hop off at the headshops on Belmont & Clark (that didn’t card us) so we could buy bongs and fake salvia and clove cigarettes or whatever.

We were breaking the rules, yes. But we were also learning how to traverse public spaces on our own. We were learning how to be in and move through the world. It’s hard to do that with parents breathing down your neck while your stuck inside in your room getting yelled at for not doing your homework.

The point I’m taking too long to make here is: Neurotic anxious adults create neurotic anxious children. This is a pretty basic fact of psychodynamic thought that started way back with one fellow named Sigmund Freud: We come to know ourselves through others. Liberals, on the other hand, think they can know themselves and solve problems through rigorous isolated introspection. No! You can only truly come to know who you are through being open and vulnerable with others. And that’s risky. It’s scary. It’s uncomfortable. Sorry, liberals. I don’t make the rules, but you aren’t the unencumbered single indiviual you think you are.

The world makes you you. And the world we made is making all of us miserable. Once we arrive at this answer, a flattened and dull life gets some texture and color injected back into it. Now there’s a task and a mission at hand: Live your life to make it better for others.