Why are young liberals so depressed?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Earlier this month the CDC released the results of its Youth Risk Behavior Survey of American teenagers. The findings have been much discussed, with the focus largely and understandably on the fact that teenage girls are suffering from extraordinarily high levels of sadness and depression . But I think the conversation has overlooked a few things.
One possible culprit for this widespread sadness is that social media apps are especially damaging to girls’ psychological health, a thesis long championed by Jonathan Haidt . And even though on its face Haidt’s point seems left-wing (new technology has downside risks and big companies need to be regulated more), the idea has taken on a mostly right-wing inflection, with Josh Hawley as its most vocal champion in the Senate.
Social media is good at generating polarization, and some of the left-inflected pushback has essentially argued that maybe teens aren’t depressed because of phones but because, in Taylor Lorenz’s words , “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.” Noah Smith and Eric Levitz both wrote good articles questioning the veracity of that doomer narrative, and Michelle Goldberg did an excellent piece trying to reframe the issue, arguing correctly that “the idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well.” 1
But I want to talk about something Goldberg mentions but doesn’t focus on: a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes titled “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” The CDC survey doesn’t ask teens about their political beliefs, but Gimbrone et. al. find not only divergence by gender, but divergence by political ideology. Breaking things down by gender and ideology, they find that liberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.
I think the discussion around gender and the role of social media is an important one. But I also don’t believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues — I think there’s also something specific to politics going on.
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. The thing about depression, though, is that it’s bad. Separate from the Smith/Levitz project of arguing about recent political trends, I think we need some kind of society-level cognitive behavioral therapy to convince people that whatever it is they are worried about, depression is not the answer. Because it never is.
The politics of depression
Three of the politics of depression paper’s authors are also co-authors on a newer paper arguing that “as efforts to increase policing and roll back criminal legal system reforms in major U.S. cities rise, the collateral consequences of increased criminalization remain critical to document” and looking at the idea that “criminalization may contribute to racial disparities in mental health.” Like most academics, they seem to be quite left-wing. If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. 2 But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting.
In keeping with that, the politics of depression authors seem very interested in the idea that liberal teens are depressed because they correctly perceive injustice in the world:
Adolescents in the 2010s endured a series of significant political events that may have influenced their mental health. The first Black president, Democrat Barack Obama, was elected to office in 2008, during which time the Great Recession crippled the US economy (Mukunda 2018), widened income inequality (Kochhar & Fry 2014) and exacerbated the student debt crisis (Stiglitz 2013). The following year, Republicans took control of the Congress and then, in 2014, of the Senate. Just two years later, Republican Donald Trump was elected to office, appointing a conservative supreme court and deeply polarizing the nation through erratic leadership (Abeshouse 2019). Throughout this period, war, climate change (O’Brien, Selboe, & Hawyard 2019), school shootings (Witt 2019), structural racism (Worland 2020), police violence against Black people (Obasogie 2020), pervasive sexism and sexual assault (Morrison-Beedy & Grove 2019), and rampant socioeconomic inequality (Kochhar & Cilluffo 2019) became unavoidable features of political discourse. In response, youth movements promoting direct action and political change emerged in the face of inaction by policymakers to address critical issues (Fisher & Nasrin 2021, Haenschen & Tedesco 2020). Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.
I’m not saying any of those particular points are wrong. But if these Columbia epidemiologists walked down the street to talk to Columbia economist Richard Clarida, I wonder how he would characterize political trends over the last 20 years. Clarida was Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Economic Policy under George W. Bush, and in terms of the big political fights of the mid-Bush years — the Iraq War, gay marriage, Social Security privatization — liberals totally ran the table. The collapse in political support for Bush-style free trade policies has been so complete that hardly anyone even remembers that’s what the conservative view was.
So is it really true that in some objective sense, conservative views are flourishing and hegemonic?
It’s really hard to definitely prove that one side or the other is “winning” the game of American politics. The answer depends on how you weigh different topics, and people often shift their views on the relative importance of things depending on the context. What I think is most relevant from a mental health perspective is that like most things in life, politics is a bit of a mixed bag that could be looked at in different ways.
The catalog of woes offered in the paper sounds less to me like a causal explanation of why progressive teens have more depressive affect than it does like listening to a depressed liberal give an account of recent American politics. Note for example the negative framing of the fact that progressives have used their agenda-setting power to make structural racism, pervasive sexism, and rampant socioeconomic inequality into unavoidable features of political discourse. One could instead say this is what the path to victory looks like — progressive activists and intellectuals have succeeded in getting more people to pay attention to what they think are the most important problems.
Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is. And while the finding that liberals are disproportionately likely to do it is interesting and important, it’s not sound practice to celebrate that or tell them that they are right to do it.
Stop encouraging people to catastrophize
I have at times in my life struggled seriously with depression. I’ve been on antidepressants, I’ve tried trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, I’ve seen therapists. I also, separately, did therapy for anger management. But I’ve been feeling good for the past few years, and one thing that strikes me about this discourse is how much the heavily political treatments of depression diverge from the practices they try to teach you in therapy.
For example, it’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control:
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Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”
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Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”
And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? Did the ensuing situation make you happier? The point isn’t that nobody should ever feel anger or that anger is never an appropriate reaction to a situation. But some of us have a bad habit of becoming angry in ways that makes our lives worse, and we should try not to do that.
Depression can be a particularly thorny problem because, as Scott Alexander writes in an excellent post, the nature of being depressed is that you become unduly pessimistic about the possibility of changing things:
But I will say this from having worked with many patients in similar situations — they are usually surprised by how much of their depression goes away after they get out of the situation. And more important, they usually overestimate how hard it would be to get out of the situation — remember, depressed people are pessimists, so the person who’s depressed because of their terrible job will naturally think they could never get another job, or that all jobs would be equally bad. Please, please, please don’t let your depressive bias keep you in your depressing situation.
Life is complicated, and this is difficult. But for a very wide range of problems, part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize. People who are paralyzed by anxiety or depression or who are lashing out with rage aren’t usually totally untethered from reality. They are worried or sad or angry about real things. But instead of changing the things they can change and seeking the grace to accept the things they can’t, they’re dwelling unproductively as problems fester.
Jill Filipovic wrote a good post a couple of weeks ago about students at Macalester College trying to block an exhibition by an Iranian-American artist named Taravat Talepasand. This incident is part of a pattern of left-wing social justice concepts being invoked to support right-wing religious sentiments held by minority religious groups and ending up in conflict with western feminists. I heard the late great Susan Moller Okin lecture on her book “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” over 20 years ago, and Filipovic is essentially writing about a new iteration of what Okin was worried about in the 90s.
But Filipovic zooms out to a larger point that I think was only embryonic in the 90s, which is that progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want:
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 and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. 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.
I thought about this again when I read a Wall Street Journal report about Stanford’s system for Protected Identity Harm Reporting . A lot of the specific controversy on campus is about free speech and the processing problems inherent in any kind of anonymous complaint system. But to Filipovic’s point, there’s a larger dysfunction in this conceptualization of “harms.”
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I think it's a combination of social media, which particularly harms young people, and what Jill Filipovic wrote, which applies more specifically to liberals who've adopted this world view:
Considering who those said young liberals consider their role models on social media, it should not be surprising at all.
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It did not, but he had to throw that in at a attempt at sounding relevant. Didn't work.
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I have had posts FAR more on topic [deleted]
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stop with the personal comments only warning
…from the seed:
“…and to navigate a complicated world.”
It seems our children are only asking the hard questions.
What brought us to this dysfunctional point and how can we make it better as a society, and where do we fit in in the face of so much blowback in just trying to do the right thing?
Our biggest failure is in not listening to their honest questions and instead leaning into our preconceived biases, casting blame, and ridiculously making them a part of the problem rather than acknowledging that they are truly our only hope.
how can we make it better as a society, and where do we fit in in the face of so much blowback in just trying to do the right thing?
Well, first I think recognizing that things are better, particularly in America, then they've ever been in the history of the world is probably a better framework to start from than teaching kids how oppressed they are.
Teaching kids the habits and mindset of the chronically anxious and depressed doesn't seem to be a strategy for making things better. No one, that I know of, would recommend anxious, depressed people as the ideal to complete any project.
“Well, first I think recognizing that things are better, particularly in America, then they've ever been in the history of the world is probably a better framework to start from than teaching kids how oppressed they are.”
Well, first…thank you for a response that deserves a reply.
You and I understand how lucky we are to have been born in America. I think our children have had the same education and in given that advantage, they are just asking why we cannot expand on the promise that we have enjoyed and pass it along to those amongst us that have not been privilege to the same advantages. It is not an unreasonable question.
sking why we cannot expand on the promise that we have enjoyed and pass it along to those amongst us that have not been privilege to the same advantage
I think we are talking about two different things here. You seem to be talking about the goal of what we kids to feel, while Yglesias, who I agree with, is pointing out the reality of what the end result of an oppression based worldview does to kids. Making victimhood the way to achieve status is a sea change in how our society has operated, and the results do not look pretty. A country of depressed, angry adults is not going to be a happy place to live.
“A country of depressed, angry adults is not going to be a happy place to live.”
And is that not the environment in which we are trying to negotiate?
At the very least, our children can see what they face in understanding what a mess we have left them. I have much more faith in them than us. But hope lives eternal.
I'll join that club.
Some of our children have had a much better education than we did. Most of them have had much worse, specifically as it relates to math and science. It's very difficult to make sense of the world without those skills, and living in a world you don't understand is scary.
The presumption that they are somehow being left a "mess" is the heart of the problem. It's not any messier now than it ever has been. Meanwhile, there are more opportunities than there have ever been before.
“ It's not any messier now than it ever has been.”
Said every older generation to their progeny.
Wasted words in a wasted attempt to explain our imaginary hardships while misunderstanding the circumstances that they face.
Are you blessed with children? Have you been blessed to have honest conversations with them? Have you been willing to soften your convictions based on their beliefs? I have and am eternally grateful that they felt comfortable enough in our relationships to express their thoughts.
Yes, and the ease of contemporary lives demonstrates it. Things are undoubtedly better than they were, and the more generations you go back that fact only becomes truer. Poor people today have access to things the Rockefellers could only have dreamed about a century ago.
“Poor people today have access to things the Rockefellers could only have dreamed about a century ago.”
So we agree progress is being made.
Why not acknowledge that we still have miles to go…that day when all of us, regardless of background, socioeconomic status, pronoun preference, or any other meaningless derivative is rendered counterintuitive and thus counterproductive…allowing us to be all we can be.
Do we teach our children how oppressed they are?
That's pretty much been the focus of progressivism the last ten years, isn't it? BLM, structural racism, reparations, so many genocides etc.. Being either oppressed or the oppressor (neither is good for mental health) pervades left wing culture, which is why it would impact young liberals who buy into it as opposed to conservatives who don't.
Or, young liberals see the the 45th President try to stage a coup, see absolutely nothing done to him about it, and the Republican Party gain control of the house and waste time jousting at windmills (which is actually a good thing),
Meanwhile the climate, which we might have been able to get a handle on had we actually done something about it when we first realized we were affecting it, continues to get warmer and cause more severe swings of weather/ drought ,but to listen to half the population it is"no-biggie"
And the issue of queer people, which they had accepted as over and done, is unearthed by reactionary, Beadle headed politicians who now start to tell them that they can't talk about "that thing" in school, where they have to be with"those people" whom they had just started to normalize, . Disney, the formerly fun and exciting home of a Mickey Mouse and lots of movies and TV shows, got their charter fucked with because they had the temerity to say that they would continue to welcome queer people by a government that is displaying signs of being fascist...
Gosh, you must be right that if they only would look around and see that they are living in the most free country on earth they would realize that it's just the way they have been thinking that is causing them to feel so damn depressed....
Perfectly said.
Whereas wiser and stronger people choose not to be depressed about things that either have almost no impact on their daily lives and/or they can't really control anyway.
Bingo!
Except for the trend predates Trump becoming President by years. But this obsessive need to blame Trump for everything wrong in the world is a symptom of what I've been talking about.
Facts matter. Blaming Trump for everything is simple answer to fit your prejudices but you should give it more than surface thought.
nwhile the climate, which we might have been able to get a
Right, there haven't been claims of climate/ecological catastrophe for decades. Fear of Ice Ages/Global Warming/Population bomb never happened. Let alone constantly being threatened by nuclear annihilation. This generation of teenagers are the first generation to ever have these sorts of civilizational worries.
he issue of queer people
Yeah, so much worse than it ever was. People arguing over whether kids should be exposed to pornography.. Kids growing up have never had to deal with other groups being that oppressed.
Thank you for demonstrating the authors point so perfectly. This compulsive need to tell kids how oppressed they are and how they have it worse than anyone in history has created a generation of depressed kids living unhappy lives. Well done!
Everything is trumps fault. That is the new race card.
If you look at that graph accompanying the article, you can see that the "rate " of depression increases across the board in approximately the middle of the Obama administration. It does not matter whether they are conservative or liberal, all increase at the same rate. So the question at the top of this article "Why Are Young Liberals So Depressed" is classic in it's misdirection from what it should be asking:
To pontificate that conservative younger people are more resilient and "wiser and stronger" is poppycock.
What we aught to be doing is looking at the experience that children and young adults have because that is where we will find the answers to the more pertinent question. To fully grasp the why, we need to look at what happened to the children longitudinally through time from when they were born up to adulthood. Why? Because that is how you know what factors effected their development and how those factors effected their mental health.
People don't usually wake up and say, "Gosh. I am feeling clinically depressed today."
My reply above was sarcastic in the extreme because I don't think that it is possible to draw the inferences he and apparently you do from the data presented. You just can't do it.
See 4.1.6
Woof
The author doesn't have a point because you cannot get from the data presented in the article to the conclusion they draw. Measuring 12th graders each year is the wrong way to do it. Longitudinal studies are required. And I bet if you put error bars on those figures they are going to overlap a great deal.
Your hyperbole notwithstanding, the situations I described are arguably factual.
You know, I didn't say anything about oppression, you did. I didn't say anything about how they have it worse than anyone in history either. You did. And I wasn't even talking to kids, I was just listing off things that have happened in recent history,to you. So your arguments against my comment are specious strawmen. You can deny this all you want, but your denials won't make it any less true that this article is just a dressed up hit job made in an effort to dupe the inumerate into thinking that liberal thinking is harmful to children.
For shame.
LOL. How else do you measure how 12th graders feel over time? It's not a longitudinal study of a specific age cohort, it's a study of how the mental health of high schoolers have changed over time.
This type of study is literally the only way to do that.
And I wasn't even talking to kids, I was just listing off things that have happened in recent history,to you.
My bad. I thought you were actually engaging on the topic. I didn't realize you were just throwing random things out there that bore no relationship to the article.
So your arguments against my comment are specious strawmen
The irony here. You literally just admitted you were making arguments that have nothing to do with the matter being discussed. .
essed up hit job made in an effort to dupe the inumerate into thinking that liberal thinking is harmful to children.
Yeah, the scientists who published the research, Matt Yglesias and Jill Filipovic are all part of a vast right wing conspiracy to create a hoax about kids' mental health. It's all a sham. No need to ever question anything that cuts against your partisan preferences for the world.
Meh. It also shows a 20% higher incidence of "depression" among people identifying as liberal, so it's not really very misdirecting at all.
Fair question.
If you'll review, you'll find I made no mention of age or political leaning.
What we ought to be doing is looking at their expectations, how well those expectations align with reality, and how they were developed.
Nice try. I give you an "E" for effort. The scientists who published the research showing the graph are not the author who published this article.
I tracked back to the linked article by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa M. Bates, Seth J. Prins, Katherine M. Keyes (which is where the author got this idea from) and read it. I am still not convinced that there are any substantial differences between the four cohorts.
That reads a lot like my post to you up the page aways, only it is more extensive.
Anyway, you have not addressed the elephant in the room, which is the question of why do those 12th graders appear to be experiencing depression at an increasing level?
Mr. Yglesias says this:
The bolded text is an example of him giving his opinion and pretending that it is somehow based in reality when it is not. Intellectual dishonesty some would call it. It argues from the a subset of liberals (ie.12th graders) and says that " Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin" is a characteristic of all liberals of all ages. This, of course, is a logical fallacy.
The gist of this whole paper is "why don't you liberals just stop worrying about all the bad stuff in the world and be happy that you are alive " It really isn't concerned about children or psychiatry, though it purports to be. Circling back to my earlier comment, it is merely using an issue that young adults have to "prove" that his way of thinking and viewing the world is the correct way.
In many ways, yes.
I have a theory as to why young liberals are so depressed. It must be hard spending all day looking for something to be outraged about and then when they find something to be outraged about the majority of people ignore their self righteous tantrum.
“I have a theory…”
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Maybe they are depressed because the people the voted for lied to them? They didn’t steal from Mom and Dad ( the rich) to give to the them (the lazy). And Mom and Dad are spending their inheritance.
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Yep.
Many people do not consider most of the young liberals issues very important
Yeah, some of the alphabet groups are just not that mainstream, defunding the police is a fucked-up policy, and having others pay your student loans off isn't high on the priority list for folks just trying to make a living.
I remember conservatives losing their shit and burning their shoes because football players were kneeling. Canceling Beyoncé and NASCAR. But my favorite was French Fries -- could you possibly make Americans look more infantile? This shit happens on both side and truthfully, WTF. There's so much you actually need to care about.
And yet, conservatives were seemingly better adjusted than liberals if you look at the data.
LOL, “seemingly” being the operative word here. “I love the poorly educated” where ignorance is bliss. During the aughts, my friends and I have watched Republicans burden our kids with massive debts. GWB's tax cuts have added $8T, his wars another $4.25T. Trump's tax cut is adding $2T, his epic mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in $7.9T being added to rescue us. We started in 2000 with a debt under $6T, 20 years later is over $28T. Republicans have also done everything they could to undermine any attempts at dealing with climate change. It really does appear that conservatives don't care about the future at all. My generation (baby boomers) and the next generation have behaved like sociopaths -- basically doing anything to get as much money as possible for themselves. If you're not being fed pablum by your media, it's going to affect you mood.
If you think anyone in DC is fiscally conservative, think again.
To read your post, one could get the impression that Democrats don't inhabit DC, too.
Agreed. However -
gov’t borrowing after Carter (the deficit) $90B/year
after Reagan/GHWB $347B
after Clinton $113B
after GWB $1,400B
after Obama $670B
after Trump $1,484B
While it’s fair to say that Democrats tax & spend, it’s also fair to say Republicans borrow & spent vastly more. Republicans have a better propaganda machine, because they are financially irresponsible, yet people really seem to think they’re financially conservative. What data back that view?
no party is fiscally conservative.
no spin will change it.
You neglected to mention that under the Biden administration so far, the deficit is 14.4 trillion or 4.7 percent of GDP for the highest sustained level in American history. Now tell us some more about Republican spending.
Never made the claim that Democrats were fiscally conservative, just pointing out that Republicans are far worse. Democrats are fiscally liberal, Republicans are fiscally irresponsible.
spin it any way you can but we didn't get over $30 trillion in debt because folks in DC are fiscally sane.
Nonsense. Here are the yearly deficit numbers:
The highest yearly deficit was for the fiscal year ending 9/30/2020 = $3.13T. Even if you mean to be talking about the debt, it was $31.5T on 6/1/23. The debt the day Biden took office was $27.8T. So, 31.5-27.8 = $3.7T which is the total amount borrowed from day 1 of Biden's presidency.
I was in fact talking about the deficit in 2023, but even going by your figures, they are still the highest in history so there is no realistic way you can say the Republicans outspent the Democrats.
Liberals aren't depressed. Don't see them waving flags of lost causes or buying merchandise from a Florida grifter.
Hell, liberals are going to concerts, going to work, drinking beer and generally having a good time. And yes, some of them are buying guns too. You know, The Second Amendment and all of that. Right?
Read the story. Not sure how to make any more simple for you.
The 'story' fits the MAGA to a TEE!
I actually feel sorry for you if you think Matt Ygelsias and Jill Filipovic are MAGA . It's just sad.
Hell, I'd be depressed as hell if I was a liberal!
If Kamala Harris and The Squad are the future of the Democratic Party, they SHOULD be depressed.
MAGA to some is anyone not aboard the Biden train.
so you think young liberals are MAGA???
Matt Ygelsias is not a liberal either. He has an ideology that leans more to pro-business libertarianism. (neo-liberalism)
The seeded article is an opinion piece, pure and simple. It is not a scientific document. There is a graph included showing a difference in "depressive affect scores" between 18 yr old liberals and 18 yr old conservatives.
The first thing that jumps out at you is that , since 2012 there has been a "dramatic" increase in "depressive effect" for both conservative and liberal boys and girls. We also see that from 2005 until appx 2011 all the lines were essentially flat. What was going on in 2011-2012 to instigate such a spike? The rapid spread of social media.
Another issue I see is the inability of a reader of this article to have any idea what these numbers mean. Yglesias certainly doesnt explain it. How much worse is a figure of 2.6 than 2.2 ? No one would know from just looking at this graph.
Yglesias clearly has an ax to grind against liberals in this article, seemingly based on his belief that they dont take his advice.
I wonder what the explanation is for conservatives being less depressed than liberals--both before and after 2012.
Probably just better-adjusted people.
He didn't claim he was. He specifically said he was sorry if the poster thought he was MAGA in response to him saying the story fits MAGA to a T--whatever the hell THAT was supposed to mean!
He certainly leans more that way than toward MAGA.
And the Biden Administration has made him one of their most watched writers.
He has even been accused of left-leaning neoliberalism in his writing. Hardly the stuff of MAGA.
neo liberalism is not left leaning
back to the drawing board for you
Silly!
You know he was one of the founders of Vox, right?
And you know Vox leans way left, right?
No way anyone could possibly confuse Vox with MAGA.
Anywho, what difference does it make if he is right or left?
Angry female liberals take the lead …… yeehaw!