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By Adam De Gree

The data is clear: the social justice fundamentalism that has dominated liberal circles on college campuses encourages students to adopt a depressing and anxiety-producing worldview.

In their universally acclaimed 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff show that the youth mental health crisis has its origins in bad thinking on school campuses.

For example, schools and universities often encourage students to see life as a struggle between good and bad people. As a result, young people are unprepared to cope with the many tragedies that arise when people with good intentions make the world worse. Anxiety is a natural response to a world that does not make sense to you.

In the years since the book’s publication in 2018, the mental health of American youth has only worsened. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, nearly 20 percent of teens and young adults said they had a major depressive episode in 2023. That’s double the rate from 2012. And concerningly, it’s almost three times as high as the rate among adults over the age of 25.

Why are young people suffering from poor mental health at such high rates? Recently, Greg Lukianoff analyzed the results of FIRE’s (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) 2024 College Free Speech Rankings to see if the predictions made in The Coddling of the American Mind prove true.

Lukianoff is FIRE’s president and CEO, so he is directly involved in the organisation’s yearly college free speech rankings. For the 2024 rankings, FIRE surveyed over 55,000 college students at 254 schools. And interestingly enough, the survey included five questions about mental health. The results are shocking.

Social justice fundamentalism is making young people anxious, depressed, and unhappy. Here’s what the data show.

One would expect that students who identified at the political extremes might have equally poor mental health. After all, extreme positions can isolate you from friends and family. But the data don’t show equal results for very liberal and very conservative students. They don’t even show similar results.

Instead, the data show an unmistakable correlation between left-wing political views and poor mental health. And the converse is also true: the more conservative students were, the better their self-reported mental health was. Even students who identified as politically moderate had worse self-reported mental health than students who identified  as very conservative.

And it’s not even close. No less than 57 percent of very liberal students said they have poor mental health at least half the time. At the other side of the spectrum, 35 percent of very conservative students reported having poor mental health at least half the time. As the graph below shows, even slightly liberal students report having poor mental health at least half the time.

Lukianoff is far from being the only researcher to find a significant correlation between leftism and poor mental health. But what is equally interesting is that the burden of poor mental health does not fall equally on all people with similar ideologies.

In FIRE’s survey, students could identify as being male, female, or non-binary. The data show that while only 41 percent of very liberal males have poor mental health, 60 percent of very liberal females and 70 percent of very liberal non-binary students do. While women are more likely to suffer from depression than men, the disparity in the general population is significantly smaller than FIRE found in very liberal students.

What does this mean? According to Lukianoff, the data strongly support the thesis presented in The Coddling of the American Mind. He argues that the social justice fundamentalism that has dominated liberal circles on college campuses encourages students to adopt a “depressing and anxiety producing worldview.”

Lukianoff thinks social justice fundamentalists promote a perspective “in which the world is utterly dominated by impersonal forces, against which human beings are simply objects that are acted upon rather than people with agency. Within this framework, individuals understandably don’t really feel like they have an internalised locus of control—or an ability to guide the course of their own lives.”

The result? Profound suffering for tens of millions of left-wing Americans who have been cut off from joy in the flower of their youth.

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Republished with thanks to Intellectual Takeout. Image courtesy of Unsplash.