A book I am currently reading may confirm a personal observation. This observation comes from my own pastoral experience. Admittedly, my perspective is that of a layperson since the issue belongs more to the realm of psychology, or even more precisely, that of psychiatry.
I am referring to the prevalence of mental anxiety and depression among the youth. Over the past few years, I have noticed an alarming increase in the number of young people sharing with me that they have experienced anxiety or depression. Quite a number would reveal that these bouts with anxiety have led them to seriously contemplate suicide. A few cases led to the actual commission of ending one’s life.
I say “few cases” because I am counting only those I have personally encountered. But one time, I said mass in a wake of a teenager who committed suicide. The family even asked me to bless the room where the act was committed. The morning after that experience, I attended a national conference of theologians, and I shared my experience with a few colleagues. To my shock, many of them attested that there is a troubling spike of such cases in the universities they are affiliated with.
This brings me to the book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt who teaches in New York University. The title pretty much tells us what the book is all about. I am not yet done with the book but what I have read so far successfully depicts the seriousness of the current problem.
The author characterizes the children prior to Gen-Z generation as “play-based childhood.” Somewhere starting around 2010, children started to live a “phone-based childhood.” Even with the advent of ordinary cell phones, children then had few occasions to access the internet. If cell phones were made available to children, they would use them mostly for contacting friends and families. Internet connections were available only with the family computers. Parents could more easily monitor when their children were turning on their computers and even what websites they were trying to open.
But things drastically changed with the emergence of smartphones. Now, internet connections are literally just a fingertip away. Even outside their homes, children could be spending lots of hours in the virtual world. The result has been a tidal wave of mental health issues among the young. Furthermore, the technology kept introducing new features that would make it enticing to take pictures of videos of oneself, or open pornographic websites.
Anxiety and depression have become more prevalent. Anxiety is to be differentiated from fear. Fear is related to a moment of danger, while anxiety refers to that situation when “our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events, including many that pose no real threat.” Depression on the other hand is the presence of feelings of sadness, emptiness and hopelessness. If this is consistently present for at least two weeks, this is characterized as major depression disorder.
When smartphones entered into our world and when children were seen often playing with them, some parents thought, “at least, my children are not playing games which may expose them to physical danger.” But parents miss the point that unsupervised play among children are healthy at their stage of mental development.
The trend today is “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world.” Haidt contends that this could explain, to a great extent, why children born after 1995 belong to the anxious generation.
By using the term “anxious generation”, is the author catastrophizing the problem? In other words, there is no denying the phenomenon of increasing anxiety. But is the problem overstated? Well, I can only say that my limited perspective tells me that the problem is worrisome.
Just like any serious book, especially those that are products of academic research, there are critics against Haidt’s book. One criticism explains that there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between the use of smartphones among the young and the prevalence of anxiety and/or depression. The criticism acknowledges correlation but not causation.
At any rate, Haidt suggests some concrete actions: 1. No smartphones before high school. 2. No social media before 16. 3. Schools to be phone-free. 4. More unsupervised play.
Parents and school administrators would do well to take seriously these suggestions, which actually do not require any legislation.
