The Crisis We See But Can't Name

The CDC released a report last week about depression and anxiety among teenagers, showing some alarming increases in suicidal thoughts, primarily among girls. As a high school teacher I'm well aware of of this phenomenon, which I feel powerless to stop.

It's notable that the spike in anxiety and depression did not start with the pandemic, and was already shooting way up around 2017. The tendency to blame all this on pandemic disruption is a bit too pat, and the data does not seem to bear that out. I was especially alarmed to see an increase in the number of girls reporting sexual assault. It's especially alarming when the percentage of teens who have had sex is decreasing, meaning that non-consensual sex represents a much higher percentage of sexual activity.

It would be very easy and very wrong to interpret all of this through a narrow “youth at risk” framing. The terrible data about teenage depression and suicide tracks with general mental health trends. Researchers Anne Case and Angus Deacon have pointed to the jump in so-called "deaths of despair" in the past 25 years from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism. This jump in deaths of despair has been especially acute among middle-aged whites, whose life expectancy is dropping and dragging down the average life expectancy overall. 

Something is truly wrong with the way we live today in the United States. One would think that all of these suicides and overdoses, especially among society's youngest members with so many years to live, would prompt political action. The fact that our life expectancy is actually decreasing should be getting the kind of attention currently being given to far more frivolous matters. Neither political party seems willing to talk about this crisis much. Relatedly, there's no massive grass roots campaign to push them to care. We seem to take all of this death and misery as a given.

In a way, that very attitude is a driving force behind this crisis with no name. Put yourself in the shoes of a teenager. You know climate change threatens untold suffering on your generation and live in fear one of your classmates shooting up your school, and that your elders don't care enough to do anything about it. In 2020, young people flooded the streets after George Floyd’s murder to demand an end to racist policing, and now the police are given more money than ever before and still commit murder. Think about all of the teenaged girls who have witnessed an outright misogynist who bragged about harassing women elected to the presidency and the judges he appointed taking away their reproductive freedom. The youth look to this bleak future knowing that the college education they need will put them in debt and a home will be too expensive to buy. 

Now go put yourself in the shoes of a middle-aged working class person doing a job that pays little money with no security or satisfaction to offer, your body already broken down and tired from it. You don't make enough to retire, so what's the point of living to old age anyway? 

Picture the same teenagers and middle-aged folk living immersed day-in and day-out in social media with its implicit message that everyone else is happier than you, and that anyone who isn't doing well has something wrong with them. Think about this especially from the point of view of teenaged girls, constantly judged by unreachable standards. 

Now put all of these people in a society where community ties and state assistance have been shredded by the onslaught of neoliberalism, where in times of turmoil you are told this nation's true creed: "you're on your own." Surround them with incessant messages that they can only make themselves happy by buying stuff, a process that keeps repeating without the promised emotional payoff. Our national ideology tells us that individualism is liberating, but it is practiced in such an extreme way that it leaves so many suffering in isolation with no larger structures to give their lives meaning. 

Cultural conservatives like to think they have the answer to all this, which usually involves a heavy dose of the old time religion and “traditional values.” If you look at the data on teenagers, however, you will see that LGBTQ youth are suffering the hardest from the mental health crisis. They suffer because those same cultural conservatives won’t accept them for who they are.

In any case, cultural conservaties have thrown in their lot with unfettered capitalism, and refuse to acknowledge its cultural effects. Modern consumer capitalism has done more to shred community ties and community values than any other social force in human history, yet these people are its biggest cheerleaders. Even the churches, the supposed antidote, are in its thrawl. A staggering number of Americanchurches practice the modern wealth Gospel, and treat their parishoners more like customers to be courted in a religious marketplace.

As I have written before, the left desperately needs to intervene in the “values” discourse and make a case for a new way of living that can liberate us from the horrors of the status quo. What we need is not individualism uber alles, but a society constructed to allow for individual human flourishing.

Most of all, we need to realize we have a problem and name it. As I have rediscovered philosophy in the past three years I have noticed a big improvement in my mental health. I have a much firmer grasp on the meaning of my existence, an understanding that helps me weather life's storms. So many people are drowning in those storms now, stripped of the resources to survive and left for dead. That is the unnamed crisis that this country must finally confront. 

(This post was adapted from one on my personal blog, Notes from the Ironbound)