Published September 25, 2024
The recent death of a young girl in Japan has brought attention to the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers in that country. Japan is not the United States, of course, and no doubt there are unique cultural expectations and dynamics that its teenagers have to navigate. But the West is not immune to the kind of despair that leads to such tragic consequences.
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with young people in America knows that anxiety and depression are everyday fare. Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt are merely two of the more well-known cultural analysts who have pointed to the problems generated by the increasingly online, disembodied, and thus disconnected existence that many teenagers now experience as normal daily life. Suicide rates among teenagers may not be as catastrophic here as in Japan, but everywhere there seems to be talk of a teenage wasteland of despair and anxiety, and anecdotal evidence of a mental health crisis on college campuses is not hard to find.
Given the comparative affluence and stability of many Western societies today, this problem should be a cause for concern. No young person in the United States, for example—especially not the typical college undergraduate—lives in daily fear of being bombed by the Luftwaffe, as my father did as a small child in England during the Second World War. Nobody is being drafted to serve in an overseas war. And yet this does not make the anxiety of young people any less real.
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Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping civic leaders and policy makers better understand the deep roots of our current cultural malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and current use of critical theory by progressives. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
