Here are a few more global teen mental health epidemic studies, for those interested.
In the Nordic countries, the same general pattern can be seen, with teen mental health problems greatly increasing in the early 2010's, though self-harm and hospitalization rates are not consistent with the Anglo pattern.
For Teens, Scandinavia is No Longer The Happiest Place On Earth.
www.afterbabel.com
As you can see, there is more variation and less data available, compared with the Anglosphere countries, four of which have much larger populations than Sweden (the largest Nordic country, with a population of 10.4 million). Nonetheless, the same trends appear to be emerging: Across all five nations, there has been a substantial increase in anxiety and depression since the early 2010s, the increase was larger for girls than boys, and it was larger for Gen Z than for older generations.
Self-harm and psychiatric hospitalization trends are less consistent, with some disconfirming evidence (i.e., declines in Denmark until 2016, and steady rates until COVID in Sweden). At this point, I do not know why these trends differ. Potential reasons for the occasional misalignment of these trends with anxiety, depression, and poor mental health trends are explored in Appendix A of
Nordic Adolescent Mood Disorders since 2010.
Importantly, when we zoom out and analyze the Nordic region as a whole, the basic pattern reveals itself to be nearly identical to what I found in Anglosphere nations, at least for depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. Figure 22 demonstrates that the increase in self-reported mental health problems among Nordic teens increased around the same time, in the same way, and to the same degree as in the United States (and other English-speaking countries).
In the preamble below, for the study of Europe, the author writes that there are undoubtedly many factors that have contributed to this decline of teen mental health. iPhones (the poisoned Apple) and constant access to social media is their main focus, and in addition to the general shift away from play-based childhoods, a big factor is also a decline in religious life.
Why girls from wealthy, secular, and individualistic nations were hit hardest.
www.afterbabel.com
When we take these points into consideration, we find that
both datasets—the
HBSC and
Eurostat—reveal the same mental health crisis that we have found in the Anglosphere: worsening adolescent mental health that begins in the early 2010s,
especially among girls, and especially among girls in the most individualistic and wealthy nations. But a surprising finding also emerged: Across both datasets, among the most important variables relating to regional variation in youth mental health was the rapid decline in religious life that has happened to various degrees across Europe.
In this post, we will examine European youth mental health data and look at psychological distress trends across 33 different European nations using the HBSC from 2002 through 2018. We will then look at how those distress trends relate to measures of GDP per capita, individualism, and religiosity. We then use the same approach to examine European youth suicide trends in 28 different European nations.
[...]
The core argument we make in this post can be summed up like this:
Adolescent mental health began to decline across Europe in the early 2010s, with girls and Western European teens hit the hardest. Underlying these regional changes is a story about how adolescents from wealthy, individualistic, and secular nations were less tightly bound into strong communities and therefore more vulnerable to the harms of the new phone-based childhood that emerged in the early 2010s.
The study indicates that:
(1) There is an East/West divide - before 2010, mental health problems were all generally steady, although Eastern European youth had more issues compared to those in Western Europe. Beginning in 2010, rates of distress for all teens across Europe began to rise, with the sharpest increase among girls in Western European nations.
(2) There is a GDP issue - high-wealth nations had lower rates of mental health problems compared to lower-wealth nations. However, young people in high-wealth nations had higher rates of increase in mental health problems after 2010. The increase was particularly large for girls in the wealthiest nations. Something happened in the early 2010s that had a devastating impact on girls in wealthier countries.
Countries with higher economic inequality have higher levels of mental health problems. But equality had no safeguarding effect whatsoever on happened in the early 2010s. Psychological distress rose faster in the more equal nations than it did in the less equal nations. The largest rise was among girls in the 'more equal' nations - the Nordic nations, Slovenia, Belgium, and The Netherlands.
(3) individualism/communalism -
Although individualism has been understood as a force that generally improves well-being by improving freedom, we believe this may have begun to change in the 2010s, especially among young people. In a rapidly transforming technological world that has amplified the importance of the self while greatly decreasing the time young people spend in face-to-face interaction with other people, individualism may actually exacerbate poor youth mental health.
Once again, while more individualistic nations in Europe seemed to be doing better overall, they had a higher rate of increase of psychological distress, which the data shows began in 2010.
(4) Religiosity - I didn't know this, but religiosity is one of the most stable predictors for good mental health among youth (in the USA). However, something happened in Protestant Europe, where the largest increases in psychological distress was seen. This was compared to Orthodox and Catholic Europe. Something happened to the girls in historically Protestant nations, where the psychological distress increased by 62%, which the authors say is the largest increase anywhere in their report.
To put all of our findings from the HBSC together, we can say the following: Before 2010, rates of youth psychological distress were lower in nations that were wealthy, or individualistic, or less religious. But something happened in the early 2010s that caused rates of distress to rise faster in those nations than in nations that were less wealthy, more collectivist, or more religious, and this was always more true for girls than for boys.
And then an interesting conclusion:
In 1897, Emile Durkheim published one of the foundational works of sociology, a book titled
Suicide. In the book, he explained that suicide rates should be understood as sociological facts in their own right, rather than just as manifestations of individual psychology. He showed that rates go up and down as a function of social forces that bind groups of individuals together, or that make such binding less likely. Durkheim found that
protestant communities had higher suicide rates than did Catholic and Jewish communities,
and he argued this was largely due to the fact that individuals in protestant nations were more socially detached, individualized, and free to make their own choices. This left them more vulnerable to anomie, or normlessness.31
Durkheim’s findings can help explain what has happened to the mental health of young people across the Western world since the early 2010s. As young people traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved their social lives largely away from (already weakened) real-world communities and into chaotic virtual online networks full of loosely connected disembodied users, those who made the move most fully found that their sense of self, community, and meaning-in-life collapsed.
Those who were more firmly rooted in mixed-age real-world communities of family, neighborhood, and religion had some protection from this transformation.
It makes the phrase 'Life is religion' really stand very clearly. What kind of life? What kind of religion?
Seems to me that in many religions there are still the everyday things that really feed the Soul - community life and gatherings, celebrations, customs, annoying or even oppressive rules and norms, specific ways of dressing and certain types of food and shared music, history and tradition, stories, wisdom and meaning.
That's part of why mainstream culture of the West is so unpalatable to me. It's kind of like a lonely, forgotten can of Coke left out in the sun - lukewarm, too sweet, and flat. It's not the kinda drink a Soul can thrive on. I think that's maybe what I'm seeing in these studies on the teen mental health epidemic, their souls are starving.
