https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girlsI ran across this article on substack today, and it really resonated with me, both with what it says about internal vs/ external loci of control and how that affects your life and with how the American Left embraced poor mental health. (not just the trans/gay thing we are talking about this year, but depressive, unhealthy thinking habits in general, across all of Gen Z)
The Army has a program called Master Resilience Training that is required for everyone to take once a quarter. As with much required training it gets muttered about and ignored a lot, but enough repetitions and it starts to get embedded anyway. MRT is basically the CBT Haidt talks about in this article. Training yourself how to think in a way that leads to success and happiness more often. I can't help but think he's right in saying that we, as a culture, spent a lot of time an energy doing the opposite; training a generation (and starting on another now) to think in a way that fosters unhappiness, failure, and depression.
It's a mildly long read but I encourage you guys to read the whole thing. It puts a lot of stuff I think we all kinda thought anyway into stark clear language and provides data for it. It's important to push back against victim culture not only because it's untrue, but it actually is harmful to the person indulging in their victim fantasy. It's probably an act of compassion to refuse to accept the generation's false victimhood.
I'll post two quotes that give kind of the feel of the article, but really, give it a read.
We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale5:
I feel I do not have much to be proud of.
Sometimes I think I am no good at all.
I feel that I can't do anything right.
I feel that my life is not very useful.
Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).
Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “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,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”
