Owing to the work of best-selling psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, what was once considered debatable has become widely acknowledged: mental health, particularly among young people, is deteriorating in many Western countries. The evidence for this trend is compelling and appears in medication rates, diagnoses, and survey results. In the United States, the suicide rate has risen by 35 percent over the last two decades. During the same time, the percentage of people rating their mental health as “excellent” has plummeted from 43 percent to 31 percent. In 2024, 43 percent of adults reported feeling more anxious than they did the year before, an increase from 37 percent in 2023 and 32 percent in 2022.
These alarming trends should prompt intense social analysis, yet the focus — both scientifically and in public discourse — has increasingly narrowed to a single phenomenon: the spread of social media. Twenge and Haidt have both contributed to the identification of this particular rationale, not least with their respective tech-focused books iGen and The Anxious Generation. The narrative has already had tangible effects, leading several European countries to implement bans on smartphones in schools. While the latter isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s clear that the discussion has taken a simplistic turn, downplaying the political dimensions of the decline in mental health.
Although representatives of the psychological discipline like Twenge and Haidt have been largely successful in reducing the crisis to a single-variable discussion, the ongoing debate about social media should be understood as a symptom of a deeper crisis within therapeutic culture and the dominant explanatory models of medicine and clinical psychology. To…
Auteur: Roland Paulsen
