The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

You can see a sudden and very large upturn in major depressive episodes, beginning around 2012. (In Figure 1.1, and in most of the graphs to follow, I have added a shaded area to make it easy for you to judge whether or not something changed between 2010 and 2015, which is the period I call “The Great Rewiring.”) The increase for girls was much larger than the increase for boys in absolute terms (the number of additional cases since 2010), and a hockey stick shape jumps out more clearly. However, boys started at a lower level than girls, so in relative terms (the percent change since 2010, which I’ll always use as the baseline), the increases were similar for both sexes—roughly 150%. In other words, depression became roughly two and a half times more prevalent.