ZACH RAUSCH, THOMAS POTREBNY, AND JON HAIDT
Here at After Babel, we have systematically documented substantial increases in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide since 2010. We first showed extensive increases in the U.S., and then across the Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). We showed similar rises in the five Nordic nations(Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland). We have also examined changes in suicide rates across nations. In the five Anglosphere countries, rates of adolescent female suicide were relatively steady before 2010.1 Afterward, their rates began to rise, reaching levels higher than those of any previous generation when they were young. Today, we look at all of Europe.
There are still researchers who are skeptical that an international youth mental health crisis broke out in the early 2010s. In a previous post, Zach showed that one reason for this disagreement lies in a widely used international database—the Global Burden of Disease—which tries to estimate rates of mental illness in all countries, including countries that do not collect mental health data. He showed that the GBD systematically underestimates rates of youth mental illness in countries that have robust national mental health data. In fact, it almost entirely misses the spike in countries where a clear spike is found in their own datasets.