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

by Jonathan Haidt

He was certainly right that we need to look at multiple indicators to know if mental illness really is increasing. A good way to do that is to look at changes in measures not self-reported by teens. For example, many studies chart changes in the number of adolescents brought in for emergency psychiatric care, or admitted to hospitals each year because they deliberately harmed themselves. This can either be in a suicide attempt, commonly done by overdosing on medications, or in what is called nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), often done by cutting oneself without the intent to die. Figure 1.4 shows the data for visits to emergency rooms in the United States, and it shows a pattern similar to the rising rates of depression that we saw in figure 1.1, especially for girls. The rate of self-harm for these young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020. The rate for older girls (ages 15–19) doubled, while the rate for women over 24 actually went down during that time (see online supplement).[21] So whatever happened in the early 2010s, it hit preteen and young teen girls harder than any other group.