It's Not the Phones - the Real Source of Our Mental Health Crisis

I'm a big fan of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and thrilled that many parents are reading his book, the Anxious Generation, which continues his quest to raise the alarm about a massive mental health crisis concentrated in our youth. But there's a conclusion I see many taking away from his work: "It's the phones, stupid".

I can't see the empirical basis for that claim, either in Haidt's work, or in any other data.

The recently released World Happiness Report 2026, which Haidt contributed to, makes this clear. Cell phones have proliferated in every country and every demographic over recent decades - reaching 100% penetration in under 25s almost everywhere. But, over the last 20 years, people under aged 25 have gotten happier in 85 out of 136 countries. In many more countries there hasn't been much change.

The massive declines in youth well being have been concentrated in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with lesser but significant declines in the UK and Ireland.

The problem can't be the phones, because the problem appears to be overwhelmingly in English speaking countries:

What could be going on here? It can't be phones or social media per se either, since social media usage has been almost identically ubiquitous to phone usage.

What sets these countries apart? Perhaps it's economic factors? A housing affordability/cost of living crisis that hit youth disproportionately?

This thesis doesn't hold up because many other regions such as East Asia and Western Europe were hit by similar or worse problems. And the decline in mental health started in 2012 when housing and prices were actually doing really well in Anglo countries, and is concentrated among the more affluent. Also, even within a country like Canada, the problem is not nearly as serious in Quebec, which had a similar economic trajectory to the rest of the country. This really does seem to be a peculiarly Anglo thing.

Also, any such countrywide causes would be expected to hit all youth, and this crisis is actually not at all among all youth. Looking at which youth are affected might point us towards the real cause of our crisis.

Finding the Epicentre

The first clue is that the crisis is very strongly concentrated among young women and girls in Anglo countries. Jonathan Haidt points out that this was also the first demographic to fall, and it fell hardest.

But it wasn't ALL young women. It was overwhelmingly liberal/progressive young women in Anglo countries that drove the changes in the overall statistics. Here's a study of 86,000 high school seniors:

The trends above have continued, and now a majority of young left-leaning women in the US report poor mental health . This is unprecedented as far as I can find in the history of mental health tracking.

In another clue, the ideological effect seems to be even stronger than the gender difference. Conservative women now report better mental health than liberal/progressive men.

One might object, with some validity, that conservatives can be less likely to admit to mental health challenges, but the trends observed are relative to baseline - they don't need to be 100% accurate about levels to show the relative trends over time.

And another trend has also been showing up over exactly this period, which is the radicalization to the left of young women:

So the group that radicalized the most to the left is also the group suffering the most. But this left wing shift of young women has been happening worldwide the last 7 or so years. And we don't see the same effects on happiness or mental health as we see in our problematic English speaking countries.

So the toxicity doesn't seem to be coming from progressive ideology or social justice orientations per se. Those things have been around a long time and are everywhere, but our crisis is new and in one place. Young progressive women in Latin America are doing just fine.

So what's left?

If we keep digging further into data for who is hardest hit, we get an increasingly clear picture. At least in Anglo countries, our mental health crisis is strongly concentrated at the far left end of the political spectrum, but it's not ALL progressives, it's overwhelmingly white liberal progressives that are afflicted:

Notice that the chart above isn't broken out by gender. When we do a full intersectional analysis of the data that includes gender, age, race, and political orientation, we reach the heart of the crisis:

Our epicenter profile: young, white, very progressive, Anglosphere women.

Not everyone, not all youth in all countries, not all leftists - just a very specific group in a very specific cultural ecosystem.

Among this group, a shocking 70%+ say they have been told by a doctor that they have a mental health condition. This is a far stronger metric than "reports poor mental health". It's all the more shocking given that these people are young, there's been relatively little time compared to other age groups to develop a mental health issue.

And none of this can be dismissed as just willingness to seek help or share challenges, because these stats and trends track closely with hospitalization for self harm, suicide rates, and other objective indicators.

I have a daughter who is being raised in a strongly progressive community in Canada. This is where this issue gets personal for me.

It's the Message, Not the Medium

Why this group? Economic conditions can't explain it - this is one of the most privileged demographics in the world and in history. These young women for example are significantly more likely to get a college degree than their male peers, at a time when a college degree is major determinant of life outcomes.

You might think that Trump is somehow responsible, but these trends predate Trump, and occurred to the same degree in countries with progressive leaders.

Some blame 'climate anxiety' and the fact that there are many legitimately depressing trends in the world, and that young women in particular have personality traits that make them more sensitive to these trends. But this again fails our geography test - polls don't show differences in levels of concern among youth about these things in Anglo countries vs others.

You could blame social media, but everyone uses social media, and the World Happiness Report makes the point that social media usage is associated with increased well being among youth in many places like Latin America.

No, we can't blame phones or the economy or politics or social media or seemingly any other kind of general structural factor. There must be something in the content - in the culture - of this demographic that explains what is happening.

Anti-Resilience Culture

While it's difficult to prove a thesis without randomized controlled testing, the data does suggest a clear cultural culprit: what Greg Lukianoff calls "Anti-CBT culture".

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is by far the most effective treatment for the mental illnesses that are skyrocketing in our epicenter demographic - anxiety and depression. This therapy works by treating "cognitive distortions" - ways of thinking that distort reality in unhealthy ways. Here are some of the most common:

• Splitting - Seeing issues as black and white, dividing the world into good and bad people. Avoiding nuance and complexity.

• Catastrophization/Negativity Bias - Seeing things in the worst light and overestimating the likelihood of the worst outcomes.

• External locus of control/Victim mentality - Attributing distress to external factors rather than building personal agency.

• Emotional reasoning - treating feelings as evidence of facts. "I feel unsafe therefore I am unsafe."

• Safetyism - the belief that discomfort is inherently damaging and not a source of growth. An expansion of the words 'harm' and 'trauma' to cover a wide range of experiences.

The foundation of CBT is that these and other distortions cause mental illness, and an enormous weight of evidence supports that thesis. Yet it is precisely these distortions that seem to be actively promoted across the entire cultural and institutional ecosystem of Anglo progressive culture: in universities, legacy media, bestselling books, HR departments and schools.

Haidt and Lukianoff extensively document Safetyism's spread through campus policies and university culture in the anglosphere as pedagogical orthodoxy. And large studies such as one at UC Irvine showed that embrace of safetyism among young people is associated with a host of other cognitive distortions. And while not all DEI content promotes cognitive distortions, one large study of Rutgers University undergraduates showed that a single exposure to standard DEI content from the field's best selling authors produced significant cognitive distortions in students.

Why are young women more affected than young men? Well to be clear, liberal-progressive young men have also been substantially affected, by about half as much as young women, who just fell first and fell hardest. The ideological factor is much more powerful than the gender factor - conservative women are reporting better mental health than liberal-progressive men.

But young, white, highly progressive anglo women are where all of the risk factors converge. They are significantly more likely to attend university than men, and even more likely to study in the humanities and social science departments that teach anti-resilience frameworks. The steep rise in mental illness since 2012 has been more concentrated in college-educated families. They're also much more likely to consume algorithmic social media - where large scale studies have shown a massive rise in cognitive distortions in recent years.

These factors all reinforce each other - where educators, managers and administrators fear a social media mob that is driven by algorithms that actively promote cognitive distortions and mental illness.

Taken altogether, this is a smoking gun for our mental health crisis. We have a subculture that is actively promoting mental illness, not just on social media but with the authority of schools and HR departments. I can't find another candidate that has anywhere near the same evidentiary support.

What's more, this culture actively polices itself to prevent challenge. The study at Rutgers University of its undergraduates showed that exposure to DEI content increased not just black and white thinking but also hostile attribution bias (falsely blaming people for things based on their identity) and a punitive approach to diversities of perspective.

So what CBT calls "treatment", this anti-resilience culture aggressively condemns as "gaslighting" or "toxic positivity". What positive psychology calls leadership and resilience, this anti-resilience culture denigrates as privilege, insensitivity, bypassing, victim-blaming and tone-policing.

For all Jonathan Haidt's celebrated success in 2024 with "The Anxious Generation", which focuses on safetyism in parenting and teen exposure to smartphones and social media, it's worth noting that he still agrees that anti-CBT culture is the root cause of the crisis we're seeing. On his blog he writes: "I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014... I don't blame everything on smart phones and social media... Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students."

I think its possible that Haidt correctly judged that "it's the phones stupid" would be a much more widely appealing argument than "it's the anglo-progressive anti-resilience culture stupid", precisely because so many of our powerful cultural institutions remain enthralled to that culture.

"Pathocracy" in Our Institutions

If anti-resilience culture makes individuals sick, what does it do to institutions? In 2022, Ryan Grim documented in the Intercept the near total collapse of the US progressive nonprofit sector over previous years. The Sierra Club, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign - virtually every major organization was paralyzed by call-out culture, internal conflict that consumed all institutional energy, and the inability to disagree constructively. Right at the time when many of their issues were at their peak threat and opportunity, these organizations virtually vanished from their missions. Years later there's still much damage and little discernible benefit from this. This was anti-resilience culture as institutional operating system - giving organizations the crippling cognitive distortions that were afflicting many of their staff. I wrote a couple of pieces in 2021 and 2022 calling attention to the horror - "A Better Way to Be a Better Human" and "To Save the World, Slay Cognitive Distortions". But it was Maurice Mitchell at the Working Families Party who wrote a widely read piece called "Building Resilient Organizations" that constituted a "have you no decency sir" moment for the sector.

But many of these organizations were schools, universities, media houses, nonprofits, foundations, DEI and HR firms and other institutions in the progressive anglosphere that have become strong purveyors of anti-resilience culture up until the present.

My expertise in this area is as a nonprofit executive and a professional democracy defender. I've seen and lived these trends in my own organizations. I've long been passionate about workplaces that allowed us to bring our whole selves, and unlock our excellence in high trust and high performance environments. But that kind of environment also carries a requirement of high self awareness, self regulation and personal responsibility. Calling and coaching people to that kind of standard is what the field of leadership calls leadership. I was externally reviewed as a manager several times through anonymous surveys of my team and got sky high ratings from across very large teams with hundreds of people. But then in the late 2010s, anti-resilience culture, particularly among the youngest most progressive Anglo staff members, turned "resilient leadership" into gaslighting, insensitivity and oppression.

Like most of my nonprofit manager peers I was very familiar with far-left circular firing squads and the kind of high drama culture that went along with it, but this wasn't the old left of Monty Python skits, this was a new incarnation - where empathy was selective and weaponized, and the race to claim a mantle of victimhood and make accusations constituted an extraordinary source of power, supported by HR rules that were not made to protect against this kind of abuse. Managers, funders and various authorities, often fearfully, encouraged the dysfunction by rewarding it. Or as journalist Jill Filipovic put it - teaching young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.

Many noticed the prevalance of Dark Triad behaviour in these contexts (The combination of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism and Narcissism) and many studies show individuals with Dark Triad traits are drawn to the political far left as well as the far right. While I didn't see that many Dark Triad folks at work in these dynamics, all it took was one to cause enormous distress and radically shift norms and behaviour among a team or community afflicted with anti-resilience culture.

Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski coined the term "Pathocracy" to describe a system wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people and punishes more reasonable and healthier ways of thinking. I think many of our progressive anglosphere universities, workplaces, nonprofits, schools and most importantly, social media filter bubbles remain stuck in some level of Pathocracy.

The Democracy Picture 

Many of us are also in a fight for our democracies, and I've seen the disabling and distortion of nonprofits and movements by anti-resilience culture contribute directly to the rise of authoritarian populism.

The ideologies associated with anti-resilience also seem to be hardwired anti-democratic. In the Rutgers study I quoted above, 35% of students exposed to common DEI content embraced dehumanizing language derived from Adolf Hitler to describe ideological opponents. This may help explain the high percentages of left wing youth (much higher than right wing youth!) in Anglo countries like the UK, who now support authoritarian government.

There's ample evidence that Russian disinformation operations have identified these illiberal dynamics and promoted them generally and specifically against targets like the Women's March. There's also plenty of evidence that the Chinese version of Tiktok is radically different from the anglosphere version, precisely in these ways of to what extent anti-resilience culture or its opposite are promoted. One Kremlin official said "They think we're messing with their democracies. We are messing with their minds.".

I've also fought big tech on several occasions as a democracy defender, and there's a story here too - anti-resilience culture first appeared to get going on Tumblr among young women in the US, partly in reaction to its political opposite but psychological cousin 4Chan, which became a toxic gathering point for far-right young men. It then migrated to Twitter in the great Tumblr diaspora and from there to TikTok and Instagram. There's enormous evidence that algorithmic social media amplifies the highly emotive and othering content that is the central diet of anti-resilience culture. The 'seductive elation of outrage' is another phrase that echoes through my head - it's the devastating and addictive drug that has many of our young Anglo-progressive women and men hooked. And so far, the DEI, HR and educational "experts" have just been making it worse.

From Diagnosis to Treatment

Phone bans and keeping kids off social media misses the target of what ails us. And the cultural right's opposition to "wokism" piles all progressive issues into one basket. It's not human rights or environmental responsibility or concerns for justice and fairness that are toxic, far from it. Anglo-progressivism just has an anti-resilience culture problem.

That culture has taken hold of a section of young people and some of our crucial institutions in Anglo countries. We need to shift to evidence-based approaches, developed by ideologically inclusive expert bodies, ideally outside the Anglo world where institutions have not been so compromised by this culture. Just a reversion to basic principles of CBT and evidence based pedagogy, psychology, leadership and HR will go a long way. And we need far more influencers on social media challenging anti-resilience culture and promoting healthier alternatives. The tough part will be finding a way that the algorithm doesn't punish them for their wisdom.

For what its worth, despite the ferocity with which some defend anti-resilience, I don't think motivations are generally bad. Most people are just doing their best, trying to do what they think or have been told is the right thing. The cultural right may have been helpful in reducing the level of coercion forcing conformity to unhealthy ideas, but it will take an inclusive, depoliticized movement to persuade our educators, administrators, influencers, and young people that promoting cognitive distortions is a road to ruin, and resilience culture is the path back to health and human flourishing, for our youth, our institutions, and our democracies.