The Decline of Play and Rise in Children's Mental Disorders
Children are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Why?
Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depressionand/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
The most recent evidence for the sharp generational rise in young people's depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders comes from a just-released study headed by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University.[1] Twenge and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that the MMPI--the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a questionnaire used to assess a variety of mental disorders--has been given to large samples of college students throughout the United States going as far back as 1938, and the MMPI-A (the version used with younger adolescents) has been given to samples of high school students going as far back as 1951. The results are consistent with other studies, using a variety of indices, which also point to dramatic increases in anxiety and depression--in children as well as in adolescents and young adults--over the last five or more decades.
We would like to think of history as progress, but if progress is measured in the mentalhealth and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950s. The question I want to address here is why.
The increased psychopathology seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the larger world. The changes do not correlate with economic cycles, wars, or any of the other kinds of world events that people often talk about as affecting children's mental states. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents were far lower during the Great Depression, during World War II, during the Cold War, and during the turbulent 1960s and early ‘70s than they are today. The changes seem to have much more to do with the way young people view the world than with the way the world actually is.
Decline in Young People's Sense of Personal Control over their Fate
One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people's sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. You might think that the sense of personal control would have increased over the last several decades. Real progress has occurred in our ability to prevent and treat diseases; the old prejudices that limited people's options because of race, gender, or sexual orientationhave diminished; and the average person is wealthier today than in decades past. Yet, the data indicate that young people's belief that they have control over their own destinies has declined sharply over the decades.
The standard measure of sense of control is a questionnaire, developed by Julien Rotter The Decline of Play and Rise in Children's Mental Disorders | Psychology Today: