The Coddling of the American Mind

by Greg Lukianoff

  In the next three chapters, we’ll show that it is not just the college campuses that have been changing; it is also the young people coming into them. Changes in adolescent mental health and in the nature of American childhood may have rendered many current students more easily burned by the “boiling” that they find once they arrive on campus.

  In Sum

  The United States has experienced a steady increase in at least one form of polarization since the 1980s: affective (or emotional) polarization, which means that people who identify with either of the two main political parties increasingly hate and fear the other party and the people in it. This is our first of six explanatory threads that will help us understand what has been changing on campus.

  Affective polarization in the United States is roughly symmetrical, but as university students and faculty have shifted leftward during a time of rising cross-party hatred, universities have begun to receive less trust and more hostility from some conservatives and right-leaning organizations.56

  Beginning in 2016, the number of high-profile cases of professors being hounded or harassed from the right for something they said in an interview or on social media began to increase.

  Rising political polarization, accompanied by increases in racial and political provocation from the right, usually directed from off-campus to on-campus targets, is an essential part of the story of why behavior is changing on campus, particularly since 2016.

  CHAPTER 7

  Anxiety and Depression

  Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.

  ANDREW SOLOMON, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression1

  The second of our six explanatory threads is the rise in rates of depression and anxiety among American adolescents in the 2010s. These mood disorders have many close relationships with the three Great Untruths.

  Here is a first-person account of depression. It is not from an adolescent, but it illustrates Andrew Solomon’s statement above, about how the conscious mind can intervene:

  I had spent the day scouring websites for ways to kill myself. At almost every turn, I found stories about how a method could fail, leaving you still alive but permanently injured. This even applied to shooting yourself. I could not risk that, so I went to the hardware store across the street, looking for strong plastic bags and metal wire. The idea was to crush up all the sleep meds, tranquilizers, and anti-anxiety meds I had, take them all at once, and then wrap my head so that even if the pills did not kill me, suffocation would. But it had to be strong enough that I could not claw my way out of the bag if I had a change of heart.

  I needed to go through with it now, as quickly as possible. Because . . . why? Because it was the right thing to do, and if I waited, I might not go through with it, and I needed to go through with it while I had the will. If I felt better later, it would somehow be a lie. I had a powerful sense that I was in touch with some dark, larger truth: that I needed to die.

  I don’t know if it was briefly sensing how strange this thought was that gave me that tiny flash of sanity that caused me to call 911. First, I started to explain what I had planned in a detached way, but soon I was crying. The voice on the other side of the line told me to get myself to a hospital right away. I listened.

  I spent the next three days of December 2007 at a psychiatric facility in North Philadelphia. I was already scheduled to move from Philadelphia, where I felt utterly isolated, back to New York City, where I had friends and family. I found a doctor who was the first person in years to reduce—rather than increase—my meds. And I started cognitive behavioral therapy as soon as I moved to New York.

  At first, it seemed to make little difference. The doctor showed me time and time again how I used every bit of brain power to support a view of myself—a schema—that said I was a hopeless, broken person. I did my CBT exercises twice a day, and I gradually came to recognize my angry, flailing, defensive mind trying to protect that nasty vision of myself.

  There was no “eureka” moment. My rational mind could understand that my thoughts were distorted, but nothing changed until it simply became a habit to hear the cruelest, craziest, and most destructive voices in my head without believing I had to act on them. When I stopped letting those voices win, they got quieter. Thanks to CBT, my mind is now in the habit of hearing my worst thoughts as if they are speaking in silly cartoon voices. While I still get depressed, the frequency and severity of those bouts are nowhere near as powerful as they used to be.

  The author of this account is Greg. He believes that CBT saved his life. In a matter of just a few months, he began to learn how to catch his own distortions. And once he learned to spot them in himself, he started to hear them coming from other people, too. Once you are accustomed to looking for them, it’s not very hard to identify catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, labeling, and all the rest.

  Almost as soon as he started practicing CBT, in 2008, Greg noticed, in his work as the president of FIRE, that administrators on campus were sometimes modeling cognitive distortions for students. Administrators often acted in ways that gave the impression that students were in constant danger and in need of protection from a variety of risks and discomforts (as we’ll discuss in chapter 10). But back then, Millennial students mostly rolled their eyes at administrative overreaction. It was only when the first members of iGen started entering college, around 2013, that Greg began to notice this more fearful attitude about speech coming from the students themselves. In the new discussions about safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and speech as violence, students often employed arguments and justifications that seemed to come right out of the CBT training manual. That’s why Greg invited Jon to lunch in 2014, and that’s why we wrote our Atlantic article in 2015.

  In that essay, we briefly discussed changes in childhood in the United States, such as the decline in unsupervised time and the recent rise of social media, but we focused our attention on what was happening after students arrived at college. At the time, we had just begun to hear the first alarms being raised by college mental health professionals, who said they were being overwhelmed by rising demand.2 We suggested that perhaps some of the very things colleges were doing to protect students from words and ideas ended up increasing the demand for mental health services by inadvertently increasing the use of cognitive distortions.

  By 2017, however, it was clear we had misunderstood what was going on. Colleges were not the primary cause of the wave of mental illness among their students; rather, the students seeking help were part of a much larger national wave of adolescent anxiety and depression unlike anything seen in modern times. Colleges were struggling to cope with rapidly rising numbers of students who were suffering from mental illness—primarily mood disorders.3 The new culture of safetyism can be understood in part as an effort by some students, faculty, and administrators to remake the campus in response to this new trend. If more students say they feel threatened by certain kinds of speech, then more protections should be offered. Our basic message in this book is that this way of thinking may be wrong; college students are antifragile, not fragile. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.

  In this chapter, we explore recent findings on the declining mental health of American adolescents. There is some evidence that similar trends may be happening in Canada4 and the United Kingdom,5 although the evidence in those countries is not as clear and consistent as it is in the United States.6 In all three countries, girls seem to be more affected than boys. How is mental health changing, on campus and off, and why did the new culture of safetyism emerge only after 2013?

  iGen

  In the 2017 book iGen (which we discussed briefly in chapter 1), Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, gives us the most detailed picture yet of the be
havior, values, and mental state of today’s teenagers and college students. Twenge is an expert on how generations differ psychologically and why. She calls the generation after the Millennials iGen (like iPhone), which is short for “internet generation,” because they are the first generation to grow up with the internet in their pockets. (Some people use the term Generation Z.) Sure, the oldest Millennials, born in 1982, searched for music and MapQuest directions using Netscape and AltaVista on their Compaq home computers in the late 1990s, but search engines don’t change social relationships. Social media does.

  Marking the line between generations is always difficult, but based on their psychological profiles, Twenge suggests that 1994 is the last birth year for Millennials, and 1995 is the first birth year for iGen. One possible reason for the discontinuity in self-reported traits and attitudes between Millennials and iGen is that in 2006, when iGen’s oldest were turning eleven, Facebook changed its membership requirement. No longer did you have to prove enrollment in a college; now any thirteen-year-old—or any younger child willing to claim to be thirteen—could join.

  But Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t really draw many middle school students until after the iPhone was introduced (in 2007) and was widely adopted over the next few years. It’s best, then, to think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially. Social media platforms proliferated, and adolescents began using Twitter (founded in 2006), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others. Over time, these companies became ever more skilled at grabbing and holding “eyeballs,” as they say in the industry. Social media grew more and more addictive. In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this:

  The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” . . . And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments. . . . It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.7

  Earlier in the interview, he said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

  In short, iGen is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?

  Twenge’s book is based on her deep dives into four surveys that stretch back several decades. One survey focuses on college students, two of them focus on teenagers more generally, and one samples the entire U.S. adult population. Her book contains dozens of graphs she created from these four datasets, showing changes in teen behavior and attitudes since the 1980s or 1990s. The lines mostly amble along horizontally until some point between 2005 and 2012, at which point they arc upward or plunge downward. Some of the trends are quite positive: members of iGen drink less and smoke less; they are safer drivers and are waiting longer to have sex. But other trends are less positive, and some are quite distressing. The subtitle of the book summarizes her findings: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

  Twenge’s analyses suggest that there are two major generational changes that may be driving the rise of safetyism on campus since 2013. The first is that kids now grow up much more slowly. Activities that are commonly thought to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood are happening later—for example, having a job, driving a car, drinking alcohol, going out on a date, and having sex. Members of iGen wait longer to do these things— and then do less of them—than did members of previous generations. Instead of engaging in these activities (which usually involve interacting with other people face-to-face), teens today are spending much more time alone, interacting with screens.8 Of special importance, the combination of helicopter parenting, fears for children’s safety, and the allure of screens means that members of iGen spend much less time than previous generations did going out with friends while unsupervised by an adult.

  The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts.

  The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11 We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen. The graphs are straightforward and tell a shocking story.

  Adolescent Depression Rates

  FIGURE 7.1. Percent of adolescents aged 12–17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year. Rates have been rising since 2011, especially for girls. (Source: Data from National Survey on Drug Use and Health.)

  Studies of mental illness have long shown that girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety than boys do.12 The differences are small or nonexistent before puberty, but they increase at the start of puberty. The gap between adolescent girls and boys was fairly steady in the early 2000s, but beginning around 2011, it widened as the rate for girls grew rapidly. By 2016, as you can see in Figure 7.1, roughly one out of every five girls reported symptoms that met the criteria for having experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year.13 The rate for boys went up, too, but more slowly (from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.4% in 2016).

  Have things really changed so much for teenagers just in the last seven years? Maybe Figure 7.1 merely reflects changes in diagnostic criteria? Perhaps the bar has been lowered for giving out diagnoses of depression, and maybe that’s a good thing, if more people now get help?

  Perhaps, but lowering the bar for diagnosis and encouraging more people to use the language of therapy and mental illness are likely to have some negative effects, too. Applying labels to people can create what is called a looping effect: it can change the behavior of the person being labeled and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.14 This is part of why labeling is such a powerful cognitive distortion. If depression becomes part of your identity, then over time you’ll develop corresponding schemas about yourself and your prospects (I’m no good and my future is hopeless). These schemas will make it harder for you to marshal the energy and focus to take on challenges that, if you were to master them, would weaken the grip of depression. We are not denying the reality of depression. We would never tell depressed people to just “toughen up” and get over it—Greg knows firsthand how unhelpful that would be. Rather, we are saying that lowering the bar (or encouraging “concept creep”) in applying mental health labels may increase the number of people who suffer.

  Adolescent Suicide Rates (per 100,000)

  FIGURE 7.2. Suicide rate per 100,000 population, ages 15–19, by sex. (Source: CDC, Fatal Injury Reports, 1999–2016.15)

  There is, tragically, strong evidence that the rising prevalence of teen depression illustrated in Figure 7.1 is not just a result of changes in diagnostic criteria: the teen suicide rate has been increasing in tandem with the increase in depression. Figure 7.2 shows the annual rate of suicide for each 100,000 teens
(ages fifteen to nineteen) in the U.S. population. Suicide and attempted suicide rates vary by sex; girls make more attempts, but boys die more often by their own hand, because they tend to use irreversible methods (such as guns or tall buildings) more often than girls do. The boys’ suicide rate has moved around in recent decades, surging in the 1980s during the gigantic wave of crime and violence that receded suddenly in the 1990s. The rate of boys’ suicide reached its highest point in 1991. While the rise since 2007 does not bring it back up to its highest level, it is still disturbingly high. The rate for girls, on the other hand, had been fairly constant all the way back to 1981, when the dataset begins, and although their rate of suicide is still substantially lower than that of boys, the steady rise since 2010 brings their rate up to the highest levels recorded for girls since 1981. Compared to the early 2000s, nearly twice as many teenage girls now end their own lives. In Canada, too, the suicide rate for teen girls is rising, though not as sharply, while the rate for teen boys has fallen.16 (In the United Kingdom, there is no apparent trend for either gender in recent years.17)

  Confirming this increase in mental illness with a different dataset, a recent study looked at “nonfatal self-inflicted injuries.”18 These are cases in which adolescents were admitted to emergency rooms because they had physically harmed themselves by doing such things as cutting themselves with a razor blade, banging their heads into walls, or drinking poison. The researchers examined data from sixty-six U.S. hospitals going back to 2001 and were able to estimate self-harm rates for the entire country. They found that the rate for boys held steady at roughly 200 per hundred thousand boys in the age range of fifteen to nineteen. The rate for girls in that age range was much higher, but had also been relatively steady from 2001 to 2009, at around 420 per hundred thousand girls. Beginning in 2010, however, the girls’ rate began to rise steadily, reaching 630 per hundred thousand in 2015. The rate for younger girls (ages ten to fourteen) rose even more quickly, nearly tripling from roughly 110 per hundred thousand in 2009 to 318 per hundred thousand in 2015. (The corresponding rate for boys in that age range was around 40 throughout the period studied.) The years since 2010 have been very hard on girls.