Misery Loves Company

The topic of Jon Haidt’s post is summarized here:

All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

This graph illustrates the point:

What happened in 2012?

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”

This passage explains the “reverse CBT hypothesis”:

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

I wanted to remark on this passage, describing the notion of “locus of control”:

As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

Radicalization—any sort of radicalization—promotes the development of an external locus of control. The radicalized tend to attribute every setback to whatever it is they’re radicalized with respect to. If you’re radicalized with respect to race, you are predisposed to attribute every setback to race; if you’re radicalized with respect to gender, you’re predisposed to attribute every setback to gender; if you’re radicalized with respect to sexual preference, you’re predisposed to attribute every setback to sexual preference; and so on.

One will always encounter hardships and setbacks in life. When there are lots of miserable radicalized people around and they are driven to make other people as miserable as they are themselves, you get, well, where we are right now.