Generation Unwell

Despite growing up in unprecedented affluence, young people are afflicted by a debilitating sense of despair. That's because an entire generation has been inadvertently robbed of agency by a culture that discourages personal responsibility. by nick cater.

Parents of troubled adolescents have been offered gratuitous advice from the Climate Council, a charity dedicated to scaring us stupid about the forthcoming apocalypse.

In a 2022 guide entitled Managing Eco-Anxiety in Your Kids, the Council’s public health expert, Kate Charlesworth, says the many daily challenges parents face are dwarfed by the risks of living in an unsafe climate.

“Given Australia’s unfortunate international reputation as a climate laggard, Australian children and young people today are likely to be particularly affected within their lifetimes,” she writes.

Charlesworth advises parents to acknowledge the challenge and validate their child’s feelings. She issues a stern warning: “Attempts to discredit the science, diminish their reaction, or shield them from the truth will only worsen the situation.”

Cultural bias, the projection of a counsellor’s values and beliefs on their clients, is a common pitfall among psychiatrists. So, too, is confirmation bias, an unconscious preference to interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing hypotheses and discounts evidence to the contrary.

Either way, climate change is an inadequate explanation for the sharp rise in anxiety and depression among young people in the past decade.

The prevalence more than doubled between 2013 and 2021, according to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data. For males aged between 15 and 34, the proportion who reported feeling anxious or depressed increased from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. For females in the same age group it rose from 13 per cent to 29 per cent.

The same dismal trend in mental health is apparent in every country where reliable data is available. In his forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt throws new light on the subject.

Like Charlesworth, Haidt looks for an external explanation for the environment in which young people grow up. For Haidt, the advent of smartphones gave young people unsupervised access to social media, exposing them to peer pressure, bullying and exclusion.

A mass of data and supporting anecdotal evidence lends weight to Haidt’s argument that smartphones are a danger to health on par with tobacco. The ban on smartphones in schools imposed by Chris Luxon’s government in New Zealand seems an obvious first step in mitigating the harm.

Yet external stresses don’t satisfactorily explain the disproportionate rise in mental illness in the Zoomer generation, those born from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s.

Karla Vermeulen draws the longest of bows in her influential 2021 book, Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11, which argues that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the increase in school shootings in the US, rising house prices, the global pandemic and (of course) climate change have combined to create a perfect storm of anxiety and revolving crises.

“No past American generation has faced the cumulative load of multiple simultaneous stressors that today’s emerging adults grew up with,” she claims.

Her arguments are hardly strengthened by leaning on the pseudoscience of repressed memory, which hides hidden traumas of which we may not be aware. Nor should we give credence to the fashionable idea that traumatic stress is inherited, an axiom of critical race theory that underpinned some of the arguments in favour of an Indigenous voice to parliament. Older Australians who experienced the Great Depression may be surprised to learn that today’s 15-25-year-olds grew up “during a period of serious economic recession … that limited their expectations for their future careers”, as Vermeulen bravely tries to argue.

Australians who survived the Holocaust or sought refuge from Eastern Europe, Communist China, Iran or other troubled nations have good reason to quarrel with Vermeulen’s claim that Zoomers raised in the prosperous, democratic West “entered into adulthood during a period of extreme political strife and internal conflict”. Say what you like about Donald Trump, but is it reasonable to claim that a generation of young Americans suffered trauma because “they’ve lived through the election and reign of a highly divisive president”?

Challenging such errant nonsense leads us to wonder if there might be something missing in the kids themselves, the grit and resilience that enabled Australia’s wartime generation to experience five years of deprivation, hardship and loss without succumbing to the debilitating despair common in today’s young people.

The solution to eco-anxiety, to the extent that is a thing at all, may not be to “validate their feelings”, as Charlesworth claims. It may be to tell Gen Z to pull themselves together and do what others have done before them: work hard and take risks with the confidence that they can right wrongs in an imperfect world.

Abigail Shrier makes the case for tough love in Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. The book was released earlier this month and became number one on Amazon in its first week. Elon Musk posted that “every parent should read it”.

Shrier begins with a paradox: How does a generation that has received more psychological counselling than any in history turn out to be the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, helpless generation on record? How did adolescents who grew up in a period of unprecedented affluence with the enabling power of digital technology become so pessimistic, fearful and fatalistic?

Shrier looks for an explanation in the prevailing therapeutic culture and the influence of parents who have gone to extreme lengths to keep their children from harm, including the perceived damage inflicted by putting children in their place, criticising poor behaviour or marking them down for mistakes.

In doing so, a generation has been inadvertently robbed of agency. Previous generations grew up with what psychologists called an internal locus of control, the belief in one’s ability to improve one’s circumstances. The therapeutic culture has encouraged an external locus of control, attributing events to external things, like other people, climate change or bum luck.

Shrier raises the alarm bell. A generation standing at the very beginning of life’s journey also believes it can’t do anything to change the world for good or ill.

It’s time we offered a little resistance to those who try to insist there is no such thing as a picky eater, just children who suffer from “avoidant restrictive food intake disorder”. We might work on helping kids improve their handwriting rather than making excuses for their dysgraphia.

We might encourage teachers to encourage shy kids to come out of their shells rather than offering the debilitating diagnosis of social anxiety disorder. We should empower them to crack down on bad behaviour rather than make excuses for their oppositional defiance disorder.

It is time to stand up to the tyranny of experts, wellness gurus and therapists responsible for the most unwell generation in recorded history.