Higher Anxiety?

Recent “meta-analyses” of 269 studies conducted from the 1950s through the early 1990s suggest that levels of self-reported anxiety and depression among U.S. children and college students have increased dramatically in recent decades. What is causing the trend?  According to the investigator, economic factors seem to play little if any role. Yet rising anxiety among the young does correlate strongly with the decline of “social connectedness.” For example: “Changes in the divorce rate, the birth rate, and the crime rate are all highly correlated with children’s anxiety.” This basic empirical finding, as well as the hypothesis regarding causation, seem quite plausible, and give us yet another reason to be skeptical of King and Booth’s suggestion that divorce is somehow unimplicated in what appears to be a sharp increase in emotional and mental distress among young people.

At the same time, two questions. Do more reports of anxiety only reflect an increase in anxiety, or do they also reflect an increase since the 1950s in general psychological awareness, including greater fluency in the language of psychology?  Also, in examining the decline of “connectedness” as a cause of the trend, why investigate only social connectedness, while ignoring spiritual connectedness? Are there links between emotional and spiritual well-being? Between depression and spiritual isolation?  Between growing anxiety among the young and growing secularism in the society? Wouldn’t these also be questions worth asking?

Sources: Jean M. Twenge, “The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (December 2000): 1007-1021.

First published Winter 2001.