A Q&A on sadness and social justice fundamentalism in ‘Plain English’

Other points and unanswered questions about the mental health effects of ‘wokeness’

I recently appeared on “Plain English with Derek Thompson” to discuss “The Coddling of the American Mind” and how what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism,” otherwise called “wokeness,” affects mental health. Readers will recall my May 21 ERI post with my FIRE colleague

Andrea Lan

where we delved into the data on this.

As I mentioned on X recently, the reactions to the episode have ranged from thoughtful and interesting to the unsurprising assertions of, “My side is happy because we're better people. Your side is miserable because you're terrible people,” and, “My side is miserable because we actually see the world accurately. Your side is happy because you're selfish monsters.”

This, as readers of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” will know, is perfectly in line with what we call The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem: “Bad people only have bad opinions” — although in this case it could be rephrased to something like, “Only bad people feel differently than I do.” Typical, and typically myopic.

And as I also mentioned on X, the point I most regret leaving out of the interview was the importance of an internal locus of control in people's happiness. Any ideology that says you have very little influence over your own life is more likely to attract more anxious and depressed people and is more likely to make them more anxious and depressed. Jonathan Haidt and I discussed this at length in “Coddling.” In his excellent July 2023 post, “The Pathologization Pandemic,”

Gurwinder

Bhogal makes many similar points:

Central to Leftism is equality, which is best justified by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasizes the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasizing the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as puppets of their environment has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their troubles are not their own fault, but the product of various problems beyond their control. These problems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly they are medical. A common example is “trauma,” a psychiatric term that’s become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused even clinicians fear it’s lost its meaning.

Unfortunately, there is an asymmetry between the political left and right in how much emphasis is given to wanting or having an internal locus of control. Conservatives may indeed exaggerate how much control individuals have over their own lives, and that’s also a problem — but if you're going to make a mental mistake, it's better to think you have more control rather than less. To this point, the ideologies that bother me the most are ones that seem to posit a universe in which we have close to zero control over our own lives.

I highly recommend checking the interview out, but I also want to take this opportunity to revisit the topic and answer a few questions to help us expand and expound upon what Andrea and I discussed in that first post.

What did your first article and research show about comparative mental health outcomes of very liberal versus very conservative students?

My article with Andrea Lan revealed a correlation between self-reported mental health and ideology among college students across the U.S. Greater percentages of liberal students — particularly very liberal students — than conservative students reported frequently feeling depressed, anxious, lonely, stressed and overwhelmed. There is a 22-point gap between very liberal and very conservative students. More than half (57%) of very liberal students reported having poor mental health at least half the time, whereas just over a third (35%) of very conservative students felt this way. 

Even when split by gender, this trend of worsening self-reported mental health as students’ ideology moves left is present (i.e., Liberal male students are more likely than conservative male students to report poor mental health. Same among females and non-binary students).

It’s also worth mentioning at the outset that our reference to “mental health” is narrowly focused on symptoms of the most common mood disorders: depression and anxiety.

Just last year, nearly 20% of teens (ages 12-17) and a similar percentage of young adults (ages 18-25) reported experiencing a major depressive episode. Compare this to only 7% of adults older than 25 last year and only 9% of teens and young adults back in 2012.

Why do you think depression and anxiety is higher for very liberal women and non-binary people and lowest for conservatives?

First, it's important to note that left-leaning people have historically had worse mental health outcomes than right-leaning people, going back almost as long as we have data. As sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University

Musa al-Gharbi

has written, this isn’t a new trend. What has changed is that the situation for left-leaning young people, and students in particular, has gotten drastically worse since around 2012.

I believe the process works like this:

Left-leaning people who tend to be more anxious and depressed now have an unparalleled ability to group together, thanks to things like technological advancements, social media, and affinity groups of various kinds. As a result, people who tend to be a little bit more depressed and a little bit more anxious surround themselves with people who tend to be a little bit more depressed and a little bit more anxious — and collectively spiral. To use an analogy from depressing ‘80s music: Back then, if you belonged to a Depeche Mode fan club, you might know a handful of other people who loved all their most depressing stuff. And you might have found yourself a little more depressed when you hung out with them. The internet is like being able to join a Depeche Mode fan club of millions, and social media is like being able to join a gated community dedicated to Depeche Mode's most depressing album, “Black Celebration,” where every morning your entire block sings “Flies on the Windscreen” together. 

But what we think makes the super-sorting or runaway homophily situation so much worse and causes happiness to plummet is a shift from the more popular left-liberalism of when I was in school in the ‘90s to the newer “social justice fundamentalism” since 2014.

As Jon and I pointed out in our 2015 “Coddling of the American Mind” article in The Atlantic, left-progressivism relies on what are called cognitive distortions. These are phenomena I became aware of when I was dealing with my own suicidal anxiety and depression back in 2007-2008. Cognitive distortions are essentially mental exaggerations. If you are too preoccupied with them, they will make you more anxious and depressed. These include things like overgeneralization, discounting positives (only seeing the negative), mind reading (thinking you know what people think and feel), fortune-telling (thinking you know what the future will look like), binary thinking (believing that there are only two options, and, typically, that only one can be correct), and catastrophizing (which is exactly what it sounds like). And part of learning to deal with anxiety and depression, particularly when implementing cognitive behavioral therapy, is to talk back to those distortions.

Left-progressivism and social justice fundamentalism are filled with these ways of thinking. And rather than talk back to the distortions, the distortions are indulged and amplified.

Another explanation for the gender differences in depression (which are laid out in “Coddling”) are the relational and psychological differences between men and women. Men are generally more physically aggressive, and while most of the time male aggression doesn’t actually end in violence (which matters, because as I’ve has written before, words and violence are not the same thing), the threat or possibility of it has been and still often is part of the way men relate to each other. In contrast, women are generally more relationally aggressive. They often battle via reputational damage, gossip, and socially isolating opponents.

What does this have to do with depression? As Jon lays out in his book, “The Anxious Generation,” smartphones and social media have placed this more “female” type of aggression into girls’ pockets — causing them to live under a constant state of fear over potential social and reputational harm. Some of the misery certainly comes from being bullied in this environment, but it can also come from being the bully. The all-or-nothing morality that is enforced in the worst aspects of left progressivism leaves its proponents in a constant state of policing one another’s speech and beliefs, which inevitably turns genuine friendships into something more like the temporary and tenuous alliances in a war (the social psychologist

Pamela Paresky

, who was our chief researcher on “Coddling,” has written beautifully on the distinction between a friend and an “ally”). And as noted in my review of Abigail Shrier’s book, “Bad Therapy,” young people are now in the habit of keeping dirt on one another to deploy in self-defense should any of their “friends” turn on them and try to get them canceled. This is a precarious and profoundly unnerving way to live.

It’s important to clarify that I am, of course, speaking about averages. Not all women are relationally aggressive; not all men are not. As I mentioned above and as Andrea and I described in our piece, one’s locus of control is at play here too. Believing you have no agency over your life is inherently depressing and inspires feelings of hopelessness. The current beliefs about race, class, and gender held by the social justice left leaves many people feeling trapped in a situation they have no power to change.

Aren't you making a big deal out of self-reported anxiety and depression? Aren't self-reports unreliable?

It’s true that young people today might simply have a lower threshold for discomfort or detecting discomfort. But that's still a problem. Whether your cortisol spikes because a lion is trying to eat you or because someone made a comment you perceive as microaggressive, your physiological reaction is the same. And because there are many potential microaggressions around you, if you have a heightened response to them you could experience the negative effects of chronic stress just as you would if you were constantly on alert for a predator.

If young people experience intense negative feelings, those feelings are real to them regardless of whether an expert determines they are adequate enough to satisfy requirements for diagnosis. As our FIRE colleague

Adam Goldstein

has put it, telling someone, “You’re not really miserable, you just think you’re miserable,” isn’t very persuasive or helpful.

It’s true that self-reported data is often unreliable, but since feelings are inherently subjective we are always going to have to rely on some level of self-reporting when discussing them. It’s also hard to imagine that people on the left and right are lying about their emotional states at such a scale that it is drastically skewing our perception of the prevalence of mood disorders.

This may once again boil down to a divergence in fundamental beliefs on feelings and locus of control. Believing you are subject to feelings (and that therefore they're something that should be evaluated more objectively) versus believing you have feelings (and can therefore learn to control them) changes one’s perspective on all of this.

I also have to highlight the fact that many studies reveal a correlation between political ideology and mental health:

• A 2022 analysis of a nationally representative survey of 12th graders found that depressive affect is highest among female liberal students. Liberal male and female students scored higher on depressive affect than their conservative counterparts. It also found internalizing symptoms in general (depressive affect, self-esteem, self-derogation, and loneliness) is higher among girls.

• The General Social Survey and Pew found a partisan gap in happiness with conservatives consistently reporting feeling happier than liberals since 1972.

• More than 50% of college-aged liberal women said a doctor/healthcare provider has told them they have a mental health condition, whereas around 20% of conservative college-aged women said the same. An analysis of a March 2020 Pew survey showed a significantly higher percentage of liberals than conservatives responding “yes” to the question, “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?”

Left-leaning people have shown higher rates of anxiety and depression going back quite a ways. Is this really anything new?

Poor mental health is not new, but it has been ramping up among everyone since the 2010s — most dramatically among liberal girls. Jon and I laid this out in “Coddling,” and Jon describes the data in more detail in “The Anxious Generation.”

As Jon notes, since 2010 there’s been a 150% increase in depression (2.5x prevalence) among U.S. teens. Our data provides a unique glimpse into how these trends are playing out specifically for students on college campuses. The prominence of depression could be partially explained by the shift in who attends college. Around 2007 the number of doctoral degrees awarded to women surpassed that of men, and women make up around 60% of undergraduate enrollment. And, as I mentioned before, women historically experience substantially higher rates of mood disorders.

We are also experiencing a unique cultural shift that began in 2014. The technological advances made in the last decade are unique in how they’ve changed the way we connect and communicate with each other. Unlike the introduction of print or television, social media is a mode of communication and connectedness that follows you around, actively seeking your attention and engagement through the power of algorithms. The books on your bookshelf don’t send you notifications every hour to read the next chapter, nor does cable TV. I do believe there is something distinct about this mental health crisis as a result of these differences.

Remember, Andrea and I found that almost half (49%) of all students in our sample (more than 55,000), report feelings of poor mental health at least half the time. That’s pretty bad. 

Why do you think very liberal students, and particularly non-binary and female students, do so much worse than very conservative ones?

In our previous piece, Andrea and I mentioned the “runaway homophily” theory, the super-sorting tendencies, and then group polarization. I am still thinking about why non-binary students fare so poorly, but the reason we think this is hitting female students so hard is that, under the logic of intersectionality (which is integral to social justice fundamentalism), women get a very raw deal. Women are generally seen as both oppressor and oppressed at once, and there's not much they can do about either situation. In the view of a woman who adopts this mindset, the world is against her (mind-reading) and the deck is stacked against all women (overgeneralizing), but women are simultaneously part of the problem (also overgeneralizing). There’s a system of oppression in which they cannot help but participate (blaming) and there's not much they can do about it other than follow rigid rules that also often involve self-flagellation and guilt (catastrophizing).

Conversely, conservatives are more likely than liberals to be patriotic, active in their religious communities, married, and less likely to divorce, traits and activities that tend to correlate with better psychological outcomes. These could all be contributing to the difference in outcomes and to one’s feelings of connectedness, community, and agency in their life.

However, it looks like this effect is found independent of religiosity. Liberals are still twice as likely to report mental illness than conservatives, regardless of the frequency of religious service attendance. Indeed, conservatives who never attend religious service have lower frequency of mental health diagnoses than liberals who attend religious service weekly.

Could it just be that the world has never been worse and liberals are just more aware of it — whereas conservatives, being more past-focused, tend to think everything's going to be okay?

I hear this idea that things have never been worse a lot, and it just blows me away. My dad was born in Yugoslavia in 1926. At six years old he lost his father (who had been evacuated to Russia after fighting in the Bolshevik Revolution) and was given away as an orphan in the 1930s. His life was unbelievably horrid. Knowing my father’s story always gives me a sense of perspective about human progress, comfort, and not taking for granted how much better it is to be alive today than in 1926.

“Things have never been worse” is an idea K-12 and college professors are teaching young people in the hopes that it will motivate them toward pro-social action. The plan is that the guilt and shame and fear will somehow encourage these young people to be better activists.

But here's the thing: Depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Yes, there is something called “depressive realism,” which is the idea that depressed people tend to have a more realistic view of the world — but there is no such thing as “anxious and despairing realism.” Anxious people tend to exaggerate small problems. They are, almost by definition, catastrophizers, mind-readers, binary thinkers, and predisposed to discounting positives. Teaching them to be anxious out of the hope that it will somehow lead to some potential positive future outcome is profoundly messed up. We have done these young people a terrible disservice by treating them as foot soldiers in the culture war.

And then of course there are the disconcerting parenting trends that Jon and I discussed in “Coddling” — and which Jon and others, like

Lenore Skenazy

, have tackled at length in writing and through their organization Let Grow: Children who were never given time to freely play or the opportunity to make mistakes, physically hurt themselves, and develop resilience (or “antifragility,” as Nassim Taleb would call it) don't know how to cope with hardships later in life. The world becomes a perpetually scary, threatening place when one lacks these critical skills, and it leaves young people incapable of distinguishing between an immediate, physical danger versus an abstract, psychological pain. This is why Jon and I initially wanted the title of “Coddling” to be “Disempowered.” Our goal was to point out how we are teaching young people mental habits that make them feel less competent, capable, collected, and resilient than they actually are.

Maybe young liberals are more depressed and anxious because of climate change? 

This question came up a lot since the podcast ran, and I have a lot of thoughts about it. 

My background is important to lay out here. I’m a big environmentalist. Between college and law school, I worked at an environmental justice mentoring program in Washington, D.C. I felt so strongly about climate change and energy policy that in 2003, I got all of my fellow Democrat friends together to propose a movement to refocus the Democratic agenda on energy policy. I did this not just because of climate change, but also because people consistently underestimate the sheer scale and scope of problems that could be solved for the entire planet and species — for all species, in fact — with inexpensive no- or low-carbon energy. 

My friends all just kind of looked at me funny at the time, but I still bring it up every so often because I think my argument is becoming more obvious by the day. 

In short: Yes, I think climate change is absolutely something to worry about, but I think there is some distorted thinking around this that is making young people more hopeless about it than they probably need to be. This attitude seems to be primarily based on two assumptions: The first is that the only way to really address climate change is by cutting emissions — something that can't possibly sit all that well with young people since they know that we've already put tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The second is that the alternative energy we should produce should be exclusively or almost exclusively renewable, like wind and solar — and if we can't produce enough of that, then we just have to look forward to a future of degrowth. This, of course, would mean most of the rest of the world will either stay in or slump into poverty, which I doubt they're going to put up with.

These two assumptions, taken together, lead to a combination of hyper-catastrophizing and fortune-telling. It also undermines people's internal locus of control. This explains the almost nihilistic undercurrent of so much climate activism, where activists feel that the only thing they can do is deface priceless works of art or vandalize Stonehenge.

Instead of this, we really should have started a political campaign long ago to think big on scientific solutions for both emissions and carbon sequestration and to figure out concrete ways to reduce the temperature of the planet. We should spend moonshot levels of money to develop these solutions. If we were to do this, some of the dozens and even hundreds of existing potential solutions could be scaled up. Nuclear could be adopted widely. Further improvements on the safety of small-scale nuclear reactors, which is already happening, could be pushed even further. We've even made some big leaps in materials technology that might make the holy grail of fusion energy possible. We should be spending a ton of money to speed that up. There are many reasons we currently aren’t, but one of them is that despair is motivating so much of climate activism these days. If you think things are hopeless, why would you bother pushing for real solutions and trying out ideas for potential fixes? Aren’t you just polishing the brass on the Titanic?

Making people miserable and despondent under the false idea that it’ll somehow lead to positive social change is not just impractical: It’s morally wrong. We are immiserating a whole generation of people “for the movement,” and it’s doing nothing good for the people or the cause. All that energy and cognitive firepower currently being used to flail in angry and futile behavior could instead be used to actually address and even fix the problem. As a lifelong environmentalist, it is absolutely maddening to witness so much wasted energy.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to

Andrea Lan

, who did such great work compiling the data we used in our original piece, and which I also used here.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Last year, with FIRE’s help, veteran and retired truck driver Jeff Gray filed civil rights lawsuits against the three Georgia cities that violated his First Amendment right to hold a sign reading “God Bless the Homeless Vets” outside of their city halls. Last summer, the first domino fell when Blackshear, GA, agreed to rescind an ordinance requiring the mayor’s permission to protest and donated $1,791 — a symbolic amount representing the year the First Amendment was ratified — to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. In November, Port Wentworth, GA, followed suit, issuing a formal apology to Gray, committing to training their police officers in the First Amendment, and declaring the space outside city hall open for expressive activity. 

This week, FIRE secured a third victory when Alpharetta, GA, agreed to educate its police on the First Amendment, avoid punishing people for demonstrating or panhandling, and pay a $55,000 settlement.

Defending free speech is truly a never-ending battle, but it’d be wrong to despair. FIRE has an incredible track record of winning on behalf of the First Amendment and freedom of speech!