We must build a better path through a culture that damages Kansas teens’ mental health

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Inas Younis was born in Mosul, Iraq, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She is a writer and commentator who has been widely published in various magazines, websites and anthologies.

When terrible things happen to good people, our first instincts are to formulate grand explanations that alleviate our anxiety and allow us to conclude that “this could never happen to me.” We choreograph our responses and attempt to move on with our lives. But when tragedy strikes a little too close to home, we can no longer afford to rely on our narratives of safety.

When it comes to the dire statistics about depression and suicide, we have all been struck, either because we have suffered a major depressive episode and contemplated ending it all or know someone who has. 

Nearly 47,000 people die from suicide every year in the United States. In Kansas, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 15-24, ranking Kansas 15th in the country for suicide rates.

Traditionally, mental health professionals and policy makers have been the ones charged with the task of identifying and understanding the reasons for what we now routinely refer to as the “Mental Health Crisis.” But a crisis of this proportion requires all of us to start paying attention.

Many professionals in this space attribute the rise in mental health problems to the COVID-19 pandemic, but according to social psychologist and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt, we need to look as far back as 2012, not 2020 to understand what is happening. 

In fact, just before the pandemic, rates of depression among teens nearly doubled. This sharp rise was not due to the reasons we suspect. It was not due to a willingness by young people to self-diagnose, nor in the willingness of clinicians to over-diagnose. These are just the safety narratives that we have been telling ourselves. 

The data offers us a less reassuring explanation.

A prominent advocate for teenage mental health, Haidt testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law on May 4 that smartphones and social media are substantial contributors in teen depression and suicide. In the period between 2012 and 2015, smartphones went from being optional to being universal among teens.

Haidt claims that social media “transformed childhood activity, attention, social relationships, and consciousness in the years between 2009 and 2012.” According to the data, by 2015 mental health centers that catered to teens and college students became overwhelmed, and now hundreds of suicidal teens sleep in emergency rooms every night.

Although Haidt does not believe that social media is the only cause of the crisis, he claims that there is no alternative hypothesis that can explain the suddenness and enormity of the problem.

Famous for his counterintuitive sociological conclusions, well-known social scientist and author Malcolm Gladwell does not blame social media directly but instead offers us a data point that might give more credence to the social media hypothesis. Gladwell claims that statistics show that suicide rates have historically been higher in countries in which citizens describe themselves as happy, compared to those in which citizens describe themselves as not very happy. 

He sums up his conclusions by coining the phrase “relative deprivation,” which is the notion that persons may feel deprived of some desirable thing relative to other persons and social groups in their vicinity. The phenomenon is facilitated by the widespread use of social media, where teens spend hours curating their image for public consumption and where strangers can literally rate you with clicks and shares.

Gladwell explores this development in his bestselling book David and Goliath, which applies this theory to high school graduates at the top of their class. He notes that once small-town high school heroes make it into the Ivy League world of status and influence, many of them experience a crisis of self-esteem and suffer a breakdown.

Having spent their entire lives being a big fish in a little pond, being a little fish in a big pond threatens their self-image. Applied to social media, the theory of relative deprivation leads us to conclude that in a world as vast as Instagram, we are all little fish in a big swamp.

Unfortunately, the solution to this is far more complicated than just limiting or banning social media use. Taking away social media when one’s peers are using these platforms to organize their social lives can lead  teens feeling like they’re no longer being included in the conversation.

We need a more nuanced approach that allows socially acceptable ways for teens to escape from technologies that exacerbate their anxiety and threaten their self-worth.

We need a countercultural movement that challenges the engineered addiction of these spaces. We need to facilitate the creation of a communal culture spearheaded by teens that pushes back against the idea that social interactions need to be curated by a third party who seeks to profit not from their joy or achievements but from their anger, anxiety and need for social approval.

It will take decades before we have any hard science identifying the causes for the surge in suicide rates. In the meantime, community business leaders, such as this year’s Leadership Overland Park class of 2022 have taken up the charge to have these difficult conversations, and to debate the fundamental questions: Why? Why now? What can we do about it?

Mental health is public health, and I am encouraged by these efforts and the work of the newly formed Overland Park Crisis Team or OPCAT, which provides mental health-related and trauma-informed support during  emergency calls.

When it comes to the mental health of our teens, some of us may be tempted to invoke the old parenting adage that we should “prepare the child for the road and not the road for the child.”

While adversity can help children develop the skills to recover and triumph during difficult times, we also need to recognize that the bromides of the past may not be enough anymore. In today’s world, the road is an ever-changing virtual landscape that is algorithmically hostile to healthy development. No one can or should be prepared for it.

Maybe at this point in our history, it’s the road that needs to change.

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