Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of more than 180 scientific publications, is probably the world’s foremost expert on generational differences. And now he has published what he considers his fundamental work, Generations, an essay in which he describes, in more than five hundred pages saturated with text and graphics based on dozens of databases, what distinguishes us from our grandparents, our children, our parents or our grandchildren.
This book, not yet translated into Spanish, has already fueled an overwhelming debate, because mental health is one of the mirrors that Twenge has chosen to compare us with. And that has served to highlight the serious deterioration of psychological problems as one of the characteristics of Generation Z, which was born in the mid-nineties. These statistics, to which the social psychologist Jon Haidt later contributed with a vast international database that includes Europe, paint a bleak picture. That is why the controversy has erupted.
In the last ten years, adolescent suicide, adolescents hospitalized after non-fatal self-harm, and university students diagnosed with anxiety, depression (episodes of deep sadness and anguish) and even major depressions (which are incapacitating for the development of a normal life) have taken off. . The most substantial and worrying increase is occurring among girls and women.
Both Twenge and Haidt have linked this new epidemic of despair to the toxicity of social media and instant messaging apps on the very young, though Haidt, already preparing a book on it, adds to the equation a parental obsession with extracurricular activities, packed schedules and insecurity in the streets, which have drastically restricted the free play of children. With so little space to think, play and act on their own, to interact and test themselves, children do not adequately develop autonomy, resilience, or the ability to negotiate their differences and those of others.
Twenge’s book illuminates the drama of Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2012) with the precedents of the previous four American generations, including the collapse in mental health that occurred in the generation of boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) against the so-called Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1945).
The boomers, when they were young, not only recognized themselves as much less happy than their parents, but later on, the days of psychological discomfort they suffered per month skyrocketed. These problems seem to have accompanied them until now. In the first two decades of the 21st century, overdose deaths increased by a factor of ten for Americans between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four, fatal liver diseases (mostly associated with alcoholism) skyrocketed 42% and suicide 60%. And all this while deaths from cancer and heart disease, the two main sources of mortality for this generation, were subsiding thanks to medical advances.
How is all this possible? For Twenge, one of the main reasons is the astonishing psychological stability of the Silent Generation, for whom suicide rates were lower, whether compared to those of the next or previous generations. His position in the story has something to do with it.
The silent didn’t get to experience the horrors of the Great Depression, while their massive enlistment and casualties (including post-traumatic stress) in the Korean War in the 1950s don’t even remotely compare to those of the generation earlier in World War II. In parallel, households enjoyed an unusually long period of welfare expansion (from the late 1940s to the outbreak of the oil shocks in the early 1970s), maturing before television raised expectations of what is or is not a life worth living and their families were not only large and stable, but also quite durable. Medical advances markedly reduced the lonely widowhood years of the older generation.
In any case, the collapse that we see in the mental health statistics of the boomers, according to Twenge, is also related to the increase in their drug use and a perverse marriage between individualism and mass society that led to the multiplication of divorces. and social expectations.
Everything, starting with marriage and continuing with prosperity, sex and work, seemed disappointing, perhaps because they began to take television as a reference to assess success or satisfaction with their lives and because they hoped that everything would always be better ( as they thought had happened to their parents). Unfortunately, they hit the wall not only from their own individual experience, but also from the oil crises of the 1970s, the recession and industrial reconversion of the early 1980s, and the gallop of inequality since then, which cut back on mobility. rising social and, for many of them, the feeling of progress.
The so-called Generation X (born between 1965 and 1979) appears with relative discretion in the section that Twenge dedicates to mental health. But don’t be fooled. We are talking about a generation with statistics for psychological problems only slightly better than those of the previous one. At the same time, suicides increased enormously among the adolescent members of this generation, and the adolescents themselves recognized that they were less happy than the boomers.
Certainly, his maturity has been revealed to be much more stable than could be expected with such a beginning. The enormous economic prosperity they have enjoyed as young adults (US GDP per capita doubled between 1985 and 2005), improvements in psychiatric treatment brought about by the advent of antidepressants such as Prozac in the late 1980s, may have contributed significantly. or the growing destigmatization of many mental illnesses thanks to testimonials from famous and admired patients, such as that of the writer William Styron in 1989 and 1990. For all these reasons, many sought help before sinking into alcohol, drugs or depression .
Curiously, the next generation, that of the millennials (born between 1980 and 1994), has behaved chronologically inversely to that of Generation X: they started well and got worse. According to Twenge, 32% of millennials recognized themselves as happier with their lives both as teenagers and in their early youth, and the numbers of adolescent suicides plummeted, between 1990 and 2007, by 40%.
However, especially since 2014, this generation’s thirty-somethings sharply accelerated their mortality rates to surpass those of the previous generation at the same age. In the first two decades of this century, young people between the ages of 25 and 34 increased their chances of dying from an opioid overdose six times compared to Generation X, their suicides climbed almost 40% and fatal liver diseases doubled.
In Europe and the United States, millennials have navigated, as young adults, the biggest financial crisis in the last hundred years, a period of extreme social and political polarization, pandemic tragedy, and a steep rise in inequality. On the other hand, they have rejected en masse communities that revolved around religion without replacing them with others that offer them a network of support, identity and meaning, and have postponed marriage and the founding of a family almost indefinitely. They felt very lonely, and the youngest began to socialize en masse through mobile phones. Today we know that the lack of physical and face-to-face (not digital) communication with the inner circle makes us more vulnerable to anxiety or depression.
Meanwhile, social networks like Instagram have once again raised life expectations for the majority, just as television did especially with the boomers, and the feeling of failure and disappointment has spread among many millennials. According to a recent study published in the journal Nature, negative language in news headlines increases the probability that we all click on them, positive language reduces it, and sadness seems to be the main emotion that generates clicks. And it is a sadness that continually feeds itself. Many young millennials, along with Generation Z teens and young adults, are getting hooked on the terrible drug of despair online in Europe too.
Of course, among this morass of pessimism, it should be noted that Jean Twenge’s study is insufficient: it unsuccessfully tries to profile the generation of those born in 2013, each comparison between two generations would deserve its own monograph and the essay deals with all from the United States. Even so, his story of the evolution of mental health is revealing and, moreover, it allows us to better appreciate the epidemic of despair that so many millions of young people born since the 1990s are suffering on both sides of the Atlantic. Will we know how to come to his aid?
