Have Americans become too fragile for their own good? | Jonathan Haidt | Big Think

Have Americans become too fragile for their own good?

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Depression and anxiety rates are through the roof amongst young Americans, with the left and the right sides of the political spectrum blaming each other. Neither has an answer, and it goes beyond buzzwords like "safe spaces" and "triggered".

When everyone feels like a victim, are the mediums of communication themselves—social media and search engines—at fault?

There is no one right answer, but Jonathan Haidt makes a case for more open talk about our insecurities. Transparent communication with others, and perhaps learning some self-therapy, can help assuage a potential generation of failure.

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JONATHAN HAIDT:

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jonathan Haidt: So, the second great untruth is "always trust your feelings"; the wisdom traditions of the entire world say "don't do that." For example, of some of the quotes we have in the book from Shakespeare, "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," from Marcus Aurelius, "The whole world is change, and life itself is but what you deem it," from Buddha, "Our thoughts are the creations of our minds; with our minds we make of the world." CBT is just a way of teaching people skills to do exactly that, to question their feelings, to look for evidence. So in CBT you learn the names of these distortions, about 15 or so distortions. You can guess what they mean: catastrophizing; black-and-white thinking; labeling; mind reading. These are the things that depressed and anxious people do a lot. One way to – all of us have had experience with these. One thing I like to think about is Homer Simpson saying, "Shut up, brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-tip!" Our brains do this. Our brains go on and on, and we're like stop it, stop it, stop it! Well, CBT is a way of stopping it. It's so easy to learn. Many people, including me, learned it from a wonderful book by David Burns called Feeling Good. In our book (and on our webpage if you go to Thecoddling.org) we have suggestions for books and apps where you can learn it. Cognitive behavioral therapy is not more effective than several other treatments, most treatments are about equally effective, but it's so easy to learn. If you teach, and I've done this in my classes, if you assign everyone in the class to learn CBT most people get it and get something out of it. Other techniques like meditation work, but they're harder. Most people drop off. So CBT is easy, really well tested, has a huge impact on a variety of mental illnesses, especially those related to depression and anxiety. We think every college student—and heck every high school student—should be taught these basic skills given how high the rates of anxiety and depression are today.

So for the last few years we've been hearing reports that counseling centers on campus are overwhelmed, we're hearing stories about rising depression and anxiety. Some people say oh it's nothing to be alarmed about. It's not real it's just that young people today they're so comfortable talking about mental illness they're more open about it and that's why the rates seem to be rising. It sounds plausible. Not true!

It's not just that young people are more comfortable. We know this because studies have been done looking at hospital admission data, who is being admitted to hospitals because they cut themselves, they took poison, they harmed themself in some other way, we see exactly the same curves. On that date in particular boys are not changing but girls are going way, way up, only teenage girls, not millennials, not kids born before 1995 but kids born in 1995 and after, the girls in particular, are cutting themselves and being admitted to hospitals in much higher rates. Most alarmingly the suicide rate, if you look at the last couple years compared to the first ten years of the century the suicide rate for American boys, teenage boys, is up 25 percent, which is a gigantic increase; the suicide rate for American girls is up to 70 percent. So something is going wrong. Something is affecting American teenagers, especially girls.

So, in the United States right now, as many people have noticed, we are seeing a huge escalation of our long running culture war; unfortunately...

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