According to the chief health officer in the county where I live, there’s an epidemic of mental illness among teenagers here. Depression and anxiety are crippling them by the thousands.
This local epidemic mirrors a larger one nationwide, one that no organization has been able to stop. This means that if we regular folks want to keep teens mentally healthy, we’ll just have to do it ourselves.
What’s causing this epidemic of mental illness?
First we need to determine what’s causing this epidemic. The consensus among mental health professionals is that the Covid pandemic set it off. That’s incorrect. The real, underlying cause is a lack of social connection.
Because we’re social primates that evolved to live and work in small, tight-knit bands, we need strong social connection to be mentally healthy. When we get it, we do fine. This is easy to see when we look at tribes like the Conibo in Peru, and the Evenki in Siberia. Because their societies emulate the hunter-gatherer bands we evolved in, the people in them rarely become mentally ill.
By the same token, we civilized folk who live in impersonally-bureaucratic, highly-competitive industrial societies become mentally ill at a far higher rate. That’s because most of us lack the strong social connection we need to be healthy.
The key to mental health: strong social connection.
During World War II, rates of mental illness dropped to almost nothing in cities that had suffered firebomb attacks. Why? Because the people in those smoldering wastelands formed tribe-like groups to survive, and the strong social connections they formed within those groups kept them sane.
The same dynamic prevails in U. S. Army units that experience intense combat. The soldiers within them have low rates of mental illness—as long as they stay with their units. It’s when they get back home, and they’re disconnected from their “band of brothers,” that they develop PTSD.
When people are a part of cohesive groups, they can be amazingly resilient. They can bounce back quickly from emotional trauma, weathering experiences that would cripple the loosely-connected. They’re also less likely to become mentally ill in the first place.
This is the case among the tribal people who live near a healing center in the Amazon jungle. According to the center’s director, they are totally unfamiliar with the mental afflictions of the Americans who visit the center. When they asked the director what was wrong with the visitors, and he told them that most were depressed, they looked puzzled and asked him, “Are they just having a bad day?”
Standard therapy can’t stop this epidemic.
Why is the epidemic of mental illness among teens getting worse, not better? The consensus among mental health professionals is that there aren’t enough resources to meet the need. If we just had more therapists, they say, the situation would improve.
That’s incorrect. Over $70 billion is spent every year on mental health treatment in the U.S., and while that amount increases every year, mental illness keeps increasing right along with it. This points to the fact that if we want to end this epidemic, we’re going to have to treat teenagers in different ways.
Right now, the standard way to treat a mentally ill teenager is to have them talk to a therapist once a week, for an hour, in an office. This helps the ones who can benefit from what Freud called “the talking cure,” which amounts to just getting stuff off your chest. But for the ones whose mental illness is more pronounced, it’s inadequate.
That’s because most psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors never investigate their patients’ social sphere. They’re like medical doctors who, when confronted with a cholera outbreak, screen each individual for a genetic predisposition to GI trouble, rather than search out the polluted well that’s making everyone sick.
It’s also because standard treatments don’t go deep enough. For example, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were committing suicide at alarming rates, despite receiving drugs and counseling. Conventional therapy couldn’t stop the suicides, so the Veterans Administration in Utah tried something else: it brought in a Shoshone medicine man to help. That medicine man, Arnold Thomas, conducted sweat lodge ceremonies that were very effective. After participating in the tribal ceremonies, the vets felt much better, and the suicides ceased.
The father of American psychology, William James, referred to depression as “soul sickness.” It’s because Mr. Thomas’ ancient treatments went soul-deep, beyond what standard therapy can touch, that he cured veterans of the most deadly mental illnesses.
Drug treatments are largely ineffective or harmful.
Standard therapy also includes drug treatment, which seldom helps patients much and often makes them worse. Recent research indicates that antidepressants are no more effective than a placebo, and can have awful side effects. As one self-described “zoloft zombie” put it:
“Upon starting my SSRI, I felt like shit. My head hurt, I couldn’t keep food down, even my eyesight seemed to be blurrier… Next thing I knew, it was months later and I was sitting on the floor of my boyfriend’s dorm crying… I had been absent for months… I was a walking zombie who had lost the capacity to feel… I want to cry when I think about what life would be like if I were still on those pills.”
Psychoactive drug treatments can even be deadly. So why are they so prevalent here? Mainly because they’re lucrative. Big pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions every year marketing drugs to psychiatrists, and they get an excellent return on that investment: sales of antidepressants exceeded $25 billion last year.
Also, drug treatments reflect a mindset that goes back 400 years, to when Descartes argued for a clear distinction between mind and body. The body, he maintained, was a kind of machine, while the mind was a strange, inscrutable phenomenon.
His ideas pioneered an intellectual climate in which science was seen as the sole source of truth, and physics was preeminent. As a result, the “social science” of psychology developed “physics envy.” That is, to have their work be seen as legitimate, scholars in the field focused on the physical. In terms of the Quadratic Map of the Cosmos, they concentrated on the Objective and ignored the Subjective.
This attitude has abated in recent years, but most medical schools (where psychiatrists get their credentials and training) and research organizations (which supply the information that informs them) still assume that problems in the mind can and should be fixed primarily by changing the biochemistry of the body.
Top-down technology “fixes” won’t work, either.
To address the mental illness that’s rampant among students, the local public school system plans to have students use an online mental health tracking system. The particulars of the system are problematic—it mines students’ data, shows ads, and includes buttons to hide it from parents—but it’s the basic idea that’s most harmful:
To address mental illness caused by a lack of in-person social interaction, the school system is…reducing students’ in-person social interaction.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, though. Although it’s exactly the wrong way to address the epidemic of mental illness, the tracking system is a win-win-win for the people putting it in place:
- It adheres to the idea that technology is the solution to every problem: a win for the hedge fund-funded technology startup company that sells it.
- It promotes the idea that social problems should be addressed through bureaucracies, not families: a win for the bureaucrats who buy it.
- It makes the problem it purports to solve worse: a win for the professionals who make a good living by treating, but seldom curing, mental illness.
What will cure young people? Social connection.
Young people in the US live in a society that starves them of social connection. As Rudyard Lynch says in his video “Why America Will Have Its French Revolution:”
“Communities have completely collapsed. People don’t even have a concept of community… The idea that almost all humans had over history, of having a family and tribe of people who they knew for their whole lives, and who would back them, is completely lost.”
To stop this epidemic of teenage mental illness and get young people healthy again, we’ll have to turn that social dynamic around. We’ll have to restructure our society at a fundamental level, to rebuild a sense of community. We’ll have to observe the Create Real Communities rule of human thriving.
We’ll also have to remake our schools to comply with another rule, Organize at Human Scale. We must make them smaller, with fewer students. That, however, is a long-term project. Right now, rebuilding community in schools involves making them more socially cohesive. How can we foster social cohesion in them? By following the example of Nelson Mandela.
In uniting South Africa after apartheid, President Mandela saw the country in terms of tribe, not race. He realized that the white Afrikaners comprised a sort of tribe, like the black Xhosa and Zulu, and that he could unite these tribes by encouraging them to become members of a larger tribe: Springboks supporters.
Afrikaners loved rugby, so first he asked them to integrate South Africa’s national rugby team, the Springboks. They did, putting a black player on the team for the first time. Then he asked the country’s Xhosa and Zulu, who saw soccer as their game, to support the rugby team. They did, singing the black miners’ song “Shosholoza” at its matches.
President Mandela’s strategy worked like a charm in South Africa, and it could work just as well here. A school principal, for instance, could encourage every student to identify as a Lion, or a Titan, or whatever the mascot is, and cheer on the school’s sports teams. The principal could rally the same support for its marching band, its academic tournament team, and any other team involved in competition. In this way, each student would be part of a “tribe” that transcended any social clique or category, and provided them with ample social connection.
Young people need a paternal presence to thrive.
For social connection to be strong, young people must have something strong to connect to. Who provides that strength? A man who embodies the rule of Take Natural Gender Roles and channels what this video refers to as the “king” energy.
Families in which a strong father sets clear rules and enforces them, and administers punishments for bad behavior, raise children that are more mentally healthy than most. As physician and psychologist Leonard Sax writes:
“Parenting researchers have consistently found that the best parents—the parents whose kids are most likely to thrive as adults—are parents who are authoritative, meaning parents who are both strict and loving… Your child, your teenager, needs you, as the parent, to provide structure, to set boundaries, and to lay down guardrails that are enforced.”
When a young person has this sort of strong paternal figure in their lives, they are reassured by the presence of benevolent authority. They feel a sense of security, and can relax into happiness and health.
Let’s take a step in the right direction.
Creating real communities in our schools, and restoring the Strong Father to our families, will take some time. There is, however, a step we can take right now that will improve teenagers’ mental health: replace their touchscreen smartphones with keypad flip phones.
Smartphones have been ubiquitous for over a decade, and when it comes to their use, the results are in: constant smartphone use causes emotional problems in young people. As smartphone use has risen among teens, so has anxiety, depression, and suicide.
Why is that? It has to do, of course, with social connection. By making interpersonal interaction among teens shallow and tenuous, and distracting them from interacting with others, smartphones decrease their social connection.
The societies with the lowest rates of mental illness are conspicuously low-tech. Conversely, the ones where mental illness is rampant are awash in internet-enabled devices with screens.
The tech barons of Silicon Valley are aware of the emotional dangers that smartphones pose, which is why many of them send their own children to a school where electronic devices are banned. It’s time we all did the same.
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