I continue to be interested in why suicide rates, and rates of depression, and anxiety have so suddenly reached such high levels in Canada and the US and elsewhere in the west.  Is it a sign of the decline of the west? What is the cause?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist from New York University who has been studying moral psychology and moral development since 1987. He says that around 2014 he noticed something had gone wrong with mental health and social behavior of college students. He began to work with Greg Lukianoff to write an article for Atlantic magazine in 2015 which they called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Later they expanded that into a book by the same title which they published in 2018. Later he also worked with Jean Twenge (a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and author of iGen) to further collect academic research on teen mental health and how it related to social media.  They made the research data  available to other scholars on line so they could contribute to the research and critique what they were collecting.

Based on that research Haidt testified before the American Senate to share what they had learned. They thought they have relevant information to a serious mental health problem among American youth that the Senate should have. He summarized the research for the members of the Senate Committee. I think it is worth looking at what he told the Senate.

The literature review the two professors performed concentrated on the time period beginning in 2012. In particular he wanted to testify on the effects of social media on the plummeting mental health of America’s youth. He testified about “the  research linking deteriorating teen mental health to the arrival and widespread adoption of social media, which transformed childhood activity, attention, social relationships, and consciousness in the years between 2009 and 2012.” Besides the effects on American youth, Haidt testified that he was very interested in the effects that social media was having on “America’s political dysfunction.” In other words it was also a societal issue. We must remember that the research show similar problems at similar times in Canada.

In part 1of his testimony he spoke about “the specific, gigantic, sudden and international mental health crisis.” Haidt began by pointing out that “the crisis is specific to mood disorders—those related to depression and anxiety” and that this was “not a general across-the-board increase in other illnesses.”

He also stated that

“The crisis is not a result of changes in the willingness of young people to self-diagnose, nor in the willingness of clinicians to expand terms or over-diagnose. We know this because the same trends occurred, at the same time, and in roughly the same magnitudes, in behavioral manifestations of depression and anxiety, including hospital admissions for self-harm, and completed suicides.”

The two professors wanted to know what was going on? It was very interesting. I will get to that in the next post.