The Gray Lady shows her colors …
I’m a somewhat reluctant subscriber to the New York Times. My wife likes the puzzles, and I think a lot of their on-the-ground journalism has been very valuable over the last ten years, but I find myself more often than not deeply frustrated by their opinion pages and by the general tenor of the Times’ reporting on topics like transgender people (especially transgender kids), campus protests, and the rise of right wing extremism. Today’s dismissive opinion video on young people’s anxiety especially annoyed me.
It is certainly fair to be concerned about people using TikTok videos to self-diagnose their mental health challenges (particularly when TikTok itself can exacerbate stress and anxiety, even as it helps people connect with others who may have similar experiences). And the cycle of awareness/over-interpretation/self-fulfilling prophecy Lucy Foulkes identifies can indeed be problematic if unchecked and not addressed by parents, trusted adults, and mental health professionals. But to call “high-functioning anxiety” a mere “hashtag” minimizes the very real challenges to well-being that young people face in the contemporary world.
Young people reach for mental illness frameworks to understand their anxiety because, as Foulkes states, that’s the framework adults present to them. It’s part and parcel with our efforts to individualize any problems that are systemic. Worried about climate change? Then address your carbon footprint! (Please pay no attention to the subsidized fossil fuel industry that contributes far more to climate change than your decision to use a cloth vs. plastic shopping bag.) Concerned about racism? You should read this book about anti-racism! (Surely three centuries of sustained economic apartheid and continued discrimination at all levels of legal and political power have nothing to do with the state of racial inequality.) Worried that you’ll never be able to afford a house, much less retire? You’re probably spending too much on avocado toast. (Radical shifts in the banking industry since the 1950s, the precarious nature of employment in a trickle-up economy, and a system heavily skewed to maintain the economic dominance of those who are already wealthy certainly don’t create any headwinds for young people today …)
I will agree with Foulkes that the self-diagnosis of mental health issues is not the path to wellness. But neither is just “sucking it up,” which seems to be the only alternative on offer. That we can even imagine a state like “high-functioning anxiety” should be a red flag that we’ve created a world that is far harder for people (young or old) to live in than it should be, and that the features of that world that make life hard are the result of choices (some conscious, some not) and not just “the way things are.”
The opinion video notes that there has been a massive increase in mental health problems among young people, and that the increase predates the pandemic (which made the already increasing stresses even worse). It doesn’t ask, though, why young people are feeling more anxious today than young people of previous generations felt.
Some of the increase could certainly be due to awareness: when I was a moderately anxious young person in the 1980s, mental health treatment was considered an option really just for the most extreme situations. Therapy is far less stigmatized now than it was forty years ago, and while that may lead to more mental illness being reported now, it also leads to more mental illness being treated, and that’s a great improvement.
But I would be hard-pressed to make the case that the future facing young people today is any less dread-inducing than the one I faced four decades ago. Sure, we were moderately concerned about nuclear annihilation (“The Day After” haunted my nightmares), and we were just becoming aware of threats to the environment (Al Gore was still a decade away from making the environment a major political issue). But we still had reason to believe that our lives would be as secure, if not more, as our parents’, and that progress was still the expected narrative.
Not so today, when the reality of climate change cannot be denied (though, of course, it is …), when economic and social inequality has risen to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, and when uncertainty in all things — housing, employment, education, the future of democracy — is a given. If a young person isn’t anxious, I’m concerned that they’re not paying sufficient attention.
This dismissive little jab at kids and their TikTok feels consistent with the rest of the Times’ approach to young people. Their campus protests are minimized, their concerns about their economic futures dismissed, their efforts to understand their own minds cast as so much misguided self-indulgence. Kids these days, I tell ya, they don’t know how good they’ve got it …
That so many young people are expressing feelings of anxiety, that they’ve latched on to efforts to understand and manage their feelings in the face of so much adult contempt, looks like a sign of real problems that we fail to address at our peril. We’ve been living lives of “quiet desperation” since long before Thoreau sat next to his little pond on the outskirts of town; that young people are finally making noise about it is something we ignore at our peril.
