(2023-03-12) Warner Teen Mental Health Distress Didnt Start With The Phones

John Warner: Teen Mental Health Distress Didn't Start with the Phones. This past week, Jonathan Haidt, New York University professor of psychology and co-author (with Greg Lukianoff) of The Coddling the American Mind: How Good Intentions are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), tweeted this out... When Haidt says there was “no sign of a teen mental illness epidemic until around 2012,” he is wrong.

the distress was present long before the ubiquity of social media use.

Madeline Levine is a clinical psychologist who spent her career working as a therapist with the children of affluent families in California. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids was published in 2006, and based in work Levine had been doing with young people years before that, an era well in advance of Haidt’s 2012 inception point.

Producing Success: The Culture of Advancement in an American High School by Peter Demerath was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009, and reflected Demerath’s research conducted over a period of four years, taking it back to the early 2000s

The article also quotes Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean at Stanford University who immediately became concerned about student attitudes towards achievement upon taking the job in 2002. Lythcott-Haims’ experiences resulted in the publication of her 2012 book...Lythcott-Haims is taking aim at parents who are trying to protect their child’s socioeconomic status and material advantages through overparenting.

What we’re looking at, I believe, is the phenomenon of “toxic meritocracy,” a term I picked up from Aaron Rabinowitz

Over time, a culture shaped by meritocratic ideals around achievement, particularly in school as a route to a good life, has turned schools from places of potential solace and personal development into gauntlets that wear young people down down bit by bit until they break.

If you want to know what toxic meritocracy looks like all grown up, check out my previous post exploring “the Fleishman Effect. (2023-02-06-WarnerWeAllWant)

Like Levine, and Demerath, and Lythcott-Haims, I also saw significant evidence of student mental health distress that is rooted in years earlier than 2012. After years of seeing this with my own eyes, in 2012, during my earliest days of blogging for Inside Higher Ed, I wrote about the high incidence of students crying in my office

I came to believe that students were often understandably crumbling in the face of a system that denied them the chance to form stable self-concepts and self-images because they were too busy achieving.