Progressives Depress Teenagers

Progressives Depress Teenagers

– By Howard Sierer –

Progressives’ pessimistic and depressing views about the nation’s future are having an outsized impact on a particularly vulnerable portion of our population: liberal teenagers are significantly more depressed than their conservative peers.

Multiple large-scale studies using several measures of psychiatric well-being have reported declines in adolescent mental health, with most indicating a deterioration that began about 2010.  For example, after dropping for 20 years, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control reported an upswing in teen suicidal ideation and behavior that began in 2010, rising steadily through 2019.

Professors at Columbia University’s Department of Epidemiology noted a possible correlation with the concurrent rise in national political division. They reviewed nationally-representative teen mental health data from 2005 to 2018 and reported their results in a peer-reviewed paper, “The Politics of  Depression: Diverging Trends in Internalizing Symptoms among US Adolescents by Political Beliefs.”

They report “findings [that] indicate a growing mental health disparity between adolescents who identify with certain political beliefs.” The data show that while depression has increased for all teens, young liberals of both sexes show greater depression than their conservative peers with liberal teen boys actually doing worse than conservative teen girls.

The authors noted that “female liberal adolescents experienced the largest increases in depressive symptoms” with their depressive affect scores increasing by 37% between 2010 and 2018. Conservative female teen girls also increased but still had 19% lower scores than liberal teen girls.

Conservatives reported lower average depressive effect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups.

Progressive website Vox founder Matt Yglesias tweeted his reaction to the study: “I think older progressive leaders deserve a healthy share of blame for creating institutional cultures that celebrate pessimism as a sign of political commitment while teaching young people to weaponize claims of subjective harm.”

On his new Slow Boring website, Yglesias writes: “Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment.”

Progressive depression has an outsized impact on the national mood and is out of step with how most Americans feel. My column documenting this dichotomy noted that while 85% of Americans were optimistic about their own futures, only 17% felt optimistic about the country as a whole.

Like Yglesias, feminist author and New York Times columnist Jill Filipovic is hard on her fellow liberals. She writes: “I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm… Leaning into the language of harm creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.”

It’s natural to be worried or sad or angry about real problems. But young people need to be taught to see the good around them, to focus on changing the things they can change and to seek the grace to accept the things they can’t.

Instead, liberal young people are bombarded continually with ever-new problems – real and supposed – that don’t lend themselves to ready solutions and any one of which will end life as they know it.

I agree with author and educator Robert Pondiscio who writes: “If you were told at a young age that your country was founded on lies, remains racist to its core, that democracy is hanging by a thread, and none of it matters because irreversible climate catastrophe is just a few years away, you’d be depressed too.”

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