William Davies is one of the most switched-on British public intellectuals, and this piece from the LRB - a review essay on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation - has many insights (not just about the book).

Take this excerpt, taking on the burden of evidence of a current epidemic of mental health problems among young people:

[There is] an extraordinary and still barely comprehended transformation in the social distribution of distress. The Resolution Foundation recently reported that people in their early twenties are more likely to be economically inactive because of ill-health than those in their early forties.

Young people in the UK now suffer higher rates of mental health disorders than any other age group; twenty years ago young people had the lowest incidence of these problems.

This is evidence of an epic failure in Britain’s post-crash social, economic and political model, yet until it started to show up as a problem in Treasury spreadsheets it was hardly recognised – except, of course, by the millions of sufferers and their families.

One way to interpret the data is to suppose that the diagnostic and demographic shifts are related. Depression, beyond its definition as an illness, has very often been viewed as an affliction of mid-life – a period of excessive responsibility, debt, guilt, when one becomes accountable for what one has done and who one has become.

It involves self-reproach, a sense that options have narrowed and that there is nobody to blame but oneself. Research on ‘subjective wellbeing’ consistently finds that it bottoms out when people are in their late forties (at 47, to be precise) before rising again until they are in their seventies.

Anxiety has often been interpreted as the consequence of an excess of freedom, of there being too much that might happen and not enough that definitely will. Existentialists and psychoanalysts agreed that anxiety has an anticipatory quality, stemming from the indeterminacy of the future.

A person with acute social anxiety may have experienced many social situations that passed off without a hitch, but there’s no guarantee that the next one won’t be catastrophic.

When this converts into somatic symptoms – racing heart, tightness of the throat, sweating – fears become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Rituals and traditions are useful protections: they demonstrate that, contrary to our worst fears, in important ways the future will be like the past. By the same logic, modernity generates anxiety by insisting that change is constantly round the corner.

We should be cautious of generalisations about the youth mental health crisis. Yet some kind of narrative is needed, if the post-2008 trend is to be recognised as a political and economic phenomenon, rather than just left as a blizzard of disparate statistics and diagnoses.

Perhaps the reasons so many young people are crippled with anxiety (as well as depression) have something to do with the anticipatory dimension of a society governed in the interests of finance and in which there are no guarantees about the future.

To be young today is to face the future – the planet’s as well as one’s own – at a time when social safety nets and familiar institutional pathways are being eroded.

Education has been recast as an individual investment, whose consequences for good and ill extend for decades. Millions of young people find ordinary parts of life such as school or work impossibly dangerous.

If depression represents a grinding to an exhausted standstill, anxiety is a terror of ever getting started – but that must be at least in part because the road ahead appears so long and arduous.

…Contrary to the tabloid suspicion that the youth mental health crisis is driven by ‘zoomers’, shopping around for diagnoses so they can spend more time in the park, the statistics suggest that material factors are at work. NHS figures show a strong correlation between the incidence of mental health diagnoses in children and the economic insecurity of their parents.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Anxiety Nation?, shows that being a homeowner and having savings goes along with better mental health across a wide range of indicators, such as good sleep and feelings of self-worth.

Prescriptions for anti-depressants are issued in greatest numbers in the most deprived areas, to children as well as adults. Whatever else might be going on, mental health disorders are certainly not a symptom of privilege.

Parents who are worrying about money, and perhaps suffering from depression and anxiety themselves, are less likely to provide a secure emotional environment for their children.

One question is what children who aren’t being enthusiastically ‘parented’ are doing with their time. Haidt notes that, in the US, ‘lower-income, Black and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives, on average, than children from wealthy families and white families.’

This being the case, ‘the “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.’

It needn’t be the case that the only options for children are hanging out on street corners, scrolling through TikTok in their bedrooms, or taking endless violin and ceramics lessons. There is another possibility: invest in public institutions for children.

In the UK at least, the post-2008 environment has been a disaster in this respect. At the time of the 2010 election, 3631 Sure Start centres were providing support for early years development (and for parents), receiving £1.8 billion in funding.

By 2023, that funding had fallen by two-thirds, and there were only 2204 centres left. The YMCA found that local authority funding for youth services in England fell by 75 per cent between 2010 and 2023. To say that austerity has been a war on the young isn’t just to complain about university tuition fees.

Labour has pledged to create the ‘healthiest generation of children ever’ through a mixture of targeted NHS investment and banning things like vaping and the advertising of junk food. Fine. But what institutions could be created to help teenagers discover a sense of autonomy and self-worth, in a safe environment that isn’t controlled by their parents?

Local government has taken such a fiscal battering over the last fourteen years that youth clubs and other youth services scarcely get a look in. Extracurricular provision in schools is the last remaining safety net, and a significant share of the current levels of distress must be attributed to the school closures of 2020 and 2021, from which (as experts warned at the time) many children may never fully recover.

The costs and benefits of those closures will never be conclusively established, and hindsight is in any case a bad guide to the chaotic, fearful atmosphere of pandemic politics.

What was clear even at the time, though, was that while school closures were fought over by teachers’ unions and their sworn enemies in the Department for Education and the press, children were given barely any say in the matter.

Lest we forget where our national priorities lie, pubs were reopened before schools.

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“If depression is grinding to an exhausted standstill, anxiety is the terror of ever getting started”. William Davies on the anxious generation