Much has been written recently on the apparent mental health crisis of younger generations.1, 2 Some researchers think this is being driven by the inordinate amount of time spent online in general (“screen time”),3 or on social media in particular.4 Other social scientists point to increasing rates of divorce and family disruption,5 while still other commentators point a causal finger at the over-psychologizing of normal life by therapists.6
Whether we are seeing a real rise in mental illness, or whether this is more of a social contagion/peer effect—or some combination thereof—is difficult to discern. Nevertheless, survey data are clear: Americans, particularly younger generations, are more often perceiving themselves to be—and being reported as—mentally ill.
Our recent Skeptic Research Center survey of over 3,000 Americans found that 67% of GenZ men and 72% of GenZ women (i.e., those born between 1997-2006) believe “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”7 It isn’t just young people, though. After all, American culture—and possibly that of most Western nations—is one dominated by therapy and psychiatry. So, while rates of identifying as mentally ill are higher in younger generations, we still found that over a quarter (27%) of Baby Boomer men and over a third (34%) of Baby Boomer women (i.e., those born between 1946-1964) believe that mental health challenges are an important part of their identity (see Figure 1).
Cynical Narratives and Mental Health
In recent years, social psychologists have begun studying this “mental illness identity.”8 Believing that mental health challenges are a salient component of one’s self-identity is a form of “self-stigmatization” which, unsurprisingly, can reduce self-esteem and limit peoples’ ability to cope with life’s difficulties.9
But why might this self-stigmatization be rising across generations? Psychologist Jean Twenge argues that GenZ, in addition to being the first generation to have grown up entirely on social media, has also been frequently exposed to apocalyptic narratives about:
- Income inequality, e.g., a recent NPR article10 titled “Private opulence, public squalor: How the U.S. helps the rich and hurts the poor,” praised the release of a #1 New York Times bestselling book titled Poverty, by America.
- The end of American civil society, e.g., a few days prior to the 2024 election Vox ran a story11 with the headline, “A second Trump term really is an extinction-level threat to democracy,” or, consider the many millions of books sold—including childrens’ book spinoffs—indicting America as a deeply racist and bigoted country, such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist (with sequels for children and adolescents).
- Climate change, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned young people that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”12
For the latter narrative, there is even some evidence that people can suffer from something called “climate change anxiety,”13 as measured by agreement with the following statements:
- Thinking about climate change makes it difficult for me to sleep
- I find myself crying because of climate change
- My concerns about climate change make it hard for me to have fun with my family or friends
- My concerns about climate change interfere with my ability to get work or school assignments done
- Thinking about climate change makes it difficult for me to concentrate
It also appears that these cynical narratives in media and popular culture often target political liberals. In 2020, political scientist Zach Goldberg14, 15 discovered, in his re-analysis of PEW Research Center data on self-reported mental health diagnoses, that liberals in general, and White liberal women in particular, were more likely than other groups to claim that they’d been diagnosed with a “mental health condition.”16
Might our culture of calamitous (and dubiously informed) political discourse be making people feel and identify as being mentally ill? And might this effect be operating disproportionately through politically liberal forms of misinformation, exaggeration, or disinformation?
Identifying as Mentally Ill versus Experiencing Mental Distress
To investigate this possibility further, the Skeptic Research Center conducted a survey of over 3,000 American adults in September 2024. In addition to asking people whether they identify with mental health challenges, we also asked them whether they were actually experiencing mental distress. To do so, we used the validated DASS-21 subscale of depression.17 This scale asks people to report the degree to which the following applied to them in the past week:
- couldn’t seem to experience any positive feeling at all
- found it difficult to work up the initiative to do things
- felt that I had nothing to look forward to
- felt down-hearted and blue
- was unable to become enthusiastic about anything
- felt I wasn’t worth much as a person
- felt that life was meaningless
Using this scale, we found that GenZ women, on average, reported the highest levels of depression (see Figure 2). This means that GenZ women who self-identified as “liberal” were both more likely than all other groups to identify with being mentally ill and more likely than all other groups to report experiences consistent with actually being mentally distressed.
However, mental distress was more related to generation than it was either to sex or to political orientation; each American generation since the Baby Boomers is more depressed than the previous generation. See the graph below for a breakdown by sex, political orientation and generation, and note the strong role generation/age seems to be playing.
We also found that identifying with one’s mental health challenges is moderately correlated with depression (r = .41 for those interested in the statistics). This would seem to suggest that younger generations are not only identifying as mentally ill but are also more likely to feel mentally ill.
Yet, at the same time, a moderate correlation is only that—moderate. Many people who reported higher depression scores failed to identify strongly with any mental health challenges and vice versa. Being mentally distressed and identifying as mentally distressed do not always occur together. There is important variation here that is worth considering.
For example, while politically conservative male Millennials reported an average depression scale score of 15.3—the third highest average depression score of all groups (Figure 2), they were one of the groups least likely to identify with their mental health challenges (Figure 3). In other words, although conservative male Millennials were the 3rd most depressed group in our sample, they were the 9th most likely to identify with mental health issues. Conservative male Millennials, relative to their age-group peers, are experiencing mental distress but not identifying with it.
Still, age appears to be playing a larger role than either political orientation or sex. Younger Americans, regardless of political identification or sex, are more likely than older generations to believe that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”
A final interesting finding worth mentioning here is that younger generations and liberals are also more likely to ascribe social status to identifying as mentally ill. Specifically, we found that these demographics more often agreed with the statement, “People with mental health challenges have more important points of view than people without mental health challenges” (see Figure 4).
This may speak to identification with mental distress as spreading by means of social contagion. To the extent that identifying as mentally ill becomes associated with social status (that is, having a “more important point of view”), this form of identification may spread regardless of whether someone is actually suffering mentally. And, when this form of identification becomes a trendy marker of social status, it will lead to competitive claims of victimization,18 where some seek to adopt more and more extreme mental-illness identity labels in order to elevate their social status and ostensibly special point of view.
The Politics of Self-Stigmatizing
We were also interested to know more about the political factors involved in these data. What specific political issues are most often associated with people identifying with mental health challenges? We discovered several issues that were significantly correlated with individuals’ tendency to do so.
Although we didn’t measure attitudes about income inequality per se, we did measure peoples’ accuracy in estimating poverty rates in America. Specifically, we asked our sample to take a guess as to the percentage of Americans living in poverty (according to the U.S. Census,19 about 11% of Americans live in poverty). Those in our sample vastly overestimated the rate: only 3% of the over 3,000 people that took our representative survey gave the correct answer, and over a third of our sample told us they think the majority of Americans (i.e., > 50%) live in poverty (see Figure 5). Revealingly, a key finding is that those who agreed more strongly that mental health challenges are an important part of their identity tended to give even more extreme overestimates of the poverty rate.
People in our sample were also quite misinformed about racial dynamics in the U.S., particularly those who told us that mental health challenges are an important part of their identity.
If you had to guess, about what percentage of Black Americans live in poverty? According to the U.S. Census, the correct answer is around 17%, a record low.20 Yet the average guess in our sample was 45% and, again, those who identified more strongly with their mental health challenges tended to give higher estimates (see Figure 6).
These individuals also tended to overestimate the frequency of other negative life experiences associated with being Black in America. We asked people to guess the percentage of Black men that will spend time in prison at some point in their lives. According to The Sentencing Project’s One in Five report,21 “one in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to experience imprisonment within their lifetime, a decline from one in three for those born in 1981.” Here, again, people overestimated the reality—the average guess being 43%! And, once again, those who self-identify as having mental health challenges that are an important part of their identity tended to give the highest estimates (see Figure 7).
The tendency for those identifying with their perceived mental health challenge to be more misinformed on these class and race issues—always in the more cynical direction—was also reflected in their more extreme and hopeless attitudes towards public policy. For example, those who more strongly agreed that mental health challenges were an important part of their identity were also more likely to agree that:
- Black people in the U.S. today will not be successful unless they receive reparations for slavery (see Figure 8)
- Companies should always prioritize hiring racial minorities before hiring White people (see Figure 9)
In other words, those who identify with a mental health challenge are also more likely to believe Black Americans have no hope for success (absent reparations) and that U.S. companies should racially discriminate in favor of minorities (presumably because, otherwise, these racial minorities would have no hope for success). These policy positions are out of step with the general American public, most of whom do not support reparations policies or compensatory racial discrimination in hiring.22, 23
What about climate change? Those identifying with a mental health challenge also tend to be less informed and more extreme in their views on this topic as well. We asked our sample to tell us whether the following statement was “true” or “false”: “Americans could solve the climate crisis if they were more committed to recycling.” In fact, there is no evidence to support this claim—while recycling can somewhat reduce the new production of plastics, there is no reason to believe recycling can solve or halt the warming of the planet. Nevertheless, those more strongly identified with a mental health challenge more often told us this claim was “true” (see Figure 10).
It is not surprising that those who believe that climate change is both easily solved (that is, by recycling), but not being solved, would tend to have more cynical views. This is also what we found. People identifying with a mental health challenge were also more likely to tell us that the statement, “Global warming will cause the Earth to be uninhabitable in 10-15 years” was “true” (see Figure 11). Those identifying with a mental health challenge were thus less informed and more cynical regarding climate change, just as they were about poverty and racial dynamics in the U.S.
It is worth noting that in a 2022 Skeptic Research Center survey of 3,014 American adults, we found that the more people agreed that racial minorities and women have no hope for success because of racism and sexism, the more depressed they also tended to report being (again, as measured with the depression subscale of the DASS-21 questionnaire).
Truth and Resilience
What should we make of these findings? Here are a few take-home points.
First, we found that those in our sample who more often identified with a mental health issue tended to be younger and politically liberal. Generationally, Baby Boomers, the oldest age cohort in the sample, were the least likely to identify with mental health challenges.
Second, we found that those in our sample who more strongly identified with a mental health challenge were also more likely to provide answers consistent with actually being depressed. So, this identification with a mental illness in many cases probably reflects some real, underlying, mental struggle.
Our analysis here can also speak to the sorts of political attitudes that those identifying with their mental health challenges tend to have. And what we’ve found, tentatively, is that the more a person’s self-concept is wrapped up in a mental health challenge, the more politically misinformed and cynical they also tend to be.
One might make the obvious point that those who report experiences consistent with mental illness might just tend to be misinformed and cynical about everything and, so, our findings here may be trivial. However, the reality is probably more complicated.
Psychologists have long known that hostile or threatening information is believed and remembered more readily.24 This also applies to journalism and news coverage—if it bleeds it leads. Academics also have an incentive to promote cynical interpretations of social life—cynical explanations or theories make people seem smart to naïve observers, an effect called the “cynical genius illusion.”25 So, it is possible that cynically-skewed misinformation from news and educational outlets are interacting with (or, possibly causing) people to feel depressed, leading to elevated levels of identification with mental health challenges that, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to accepting cynically-skewed misinformation.
On the topic of race and crime, for example, both trust in news and trust in academia might contribute to misinformed and cynical understandings. Psychologist Chris Ferguson has found that public perception of race relations is significantly, and negatively, influenced by news media coverage.26 As for academia, several recent, highly cited and very cynical research papers on the topic of racial discrimination have had to be retracted as fraudulent.27 Nonetheless, their influence had already shaped public attitudes.
To summarize, it is not good for a populace to be misinformed, cynical, and to overly self-identify with their mental health challenges. We see this problem as having two equal sides. First, there are societal dynamics that encourage individuals to view and label themselves as mentally ill. Second, there are dynamics that promote and spread misinformation, much of which is threatening and fosters cynicism.
These dynamics interact, causing pain and dysfunction, particularly among certain political and demographic subsets of America. The institutions of medicine, psychiatry, journalism, and academia do not exist perfectly in their current form, and reform efforts are ongoing. The internet and social media are also the Wild West, and the development of norms regarding their proper use is ongoing.
Truth and resilience are the answer, of course. Holding accurate beliefs is enlightening, and often, not as scary as we fear they will be. Resilience is emboldening and, often, we are not as frail as we think we are. And that is cause for hope.
