(Or, why are our teens so depressed these days?)
Recently, I’ve seen a ton of writing about the mental health crisis among teenagers. I’m spotting the articles myself “in the wild,” but people are also sending them to me directly… I guess teen mental health is my beat now? Happy to offer some thoughts, though I can speak only for myself. Yes, I’ve got some up-close experience, but every situation is unique, and I’m reading the same articles y’all are.
The big question is “why.” What’s causing the surge generally? And/or, what’s at the root of a particular person’s depression? I get variations on these questions all the time. The wondering is understandable–if we don’t have a basic grasp on the problem, we can’t begin to address it–but the hunting around for The Cause can be problematic. Please be careful in how you do this, especially with someone who’s struggling. “Why is this happening” is a question for your benefit, not theirs. You’re asking a suffering person or their family member to be your personal educator. Do you need to understand the root cause in order to offer kindness and love? Reader, you do not. Anyway, this is all very, very complex.
You should also know that we can tell when someone’s asking this because they’re compassionately curious and they care, or when they’re trying to manage their own anxiety, or worse, seeking confirmation of a pet theory that usually reinforces their own biases. “Why is this happening” can come with a subtext of “it sure didn’t happen in the good old days,” occasionally with an even deeper subtext of “because we had our act together back then in a way that [parents, schools, churches, societies] no longer do.” (Side note: yeah, my forbears didn’t go to therapy, but a few of them damn sure drank themselves to death.)
Here are just a few reasons I’ve seen cited for the dramatic uptick in depression, anxiety, and suicidality among our young people, especially girls. As you can see, these range from reasonable hypotheses to dubious personal hobbyhorses to truly bonkers theories:
social media
video games
the pandemic
climate change
unresolved generational trauma
online bullying
an overly-engaged style of parenting that coddles kids and gives everyone a trophy
…an overly-DISengaged style of parenting in which parents take their kids to the playground and sit there on their phone rather than watching them (which is it? Geez, make up your minds)
Christian nationalism (a novel one from a great thinker, but I’m not quite sold. I realize the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but my kids have never even heard of complementarianism. I abhor Christian nationalism, but good old fashioned patriarchy is plenty explanation enough)
systemic racism
people who go on and on about systemic racism, thus making white children “feel bad”
trigger warnings that make everybody soft instead of resilient
the threat of mass shootings and a childhood peppered with active-shooter drills
the ubiquitousness of pornography and prevalence of sexual assault
too much LGBTQ murkiness that confuses kids into being something other than male and female (As a parent of two queer kids, I can barely type that sentence. At least for my children, it’s the scapegoating, especially of trans kids, that’s a more likely factor)
the pressures of school and the drive to achieve above all else
rising inequality and a sense that the system is rigged
the opioid epidemic and other substance abuse
And finally, progressivism, and particularly the Obama administration. The pinnacle of “thanks Obama,” I guess.
So which is it?
My fifteen year old is taking a class this quarter on sustainable agriculture. He told me there are two kinds of pollution, point source and nonpoint source. Point source is when you can identify where the pollution is coming from—a pipeline, a shipping vessel, a factory. Nonpoint comes from nonspecific places that are complicated to trace. Nonpoint is runoff. Fertilizer, that’s not all that toxic but is used over a wide enough area that it leaches into the soil and then impacts the watersheds. Nonpoint is animal waste and toxic chemicals and drainage from abandoned mines.
That’s the mental health crisis.
We all want to be able to point to a smokestack. That one, right over there!
If only.
Social media wouldn’t be nearly the destructive force it is if we hadn’t also been seeing a decline in IRL social ties over multiple decades. Climate change could be the occasion for humanity’s finest hour, if we had a political system that strived for the greater good and wasn’t devastatingly broken. We need to start getting comfortable with the discomfort that it’s twenty different things which all add up to a culture that really isn’t working great for anyone–it’s just that our kids (especially girls and female-identifying) are the canaries in the coal mine. As my therapist said this week on this topic, “the pandemic bill is coming due.” But not just the pandemic bill–all of the bills.
MaryAnn McKibben Dana is a writer, speaker, and ministry coach living in the Virginia suburbs of DC. She is author of Hope: A User’s Manual (2022), God, Improv, and the Art of Living (2018), and Sabbath in the Suburbs (2012). She currently serves as Associate Pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, VA. This post was originally posted on her substack, The Blue Room.