"Do you experience persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness?"
57 percent of female and 29 percent of male high school students in the USA answered "yes" to this question in 2021. This is a huge increase compared to previous years since 2011.

While depression is on the rise among young people in general and in many countries worldwide, girls are more affected. But another group seems to be particularly hard hit: Liberals. According to a study conducted in 2022, those who classify themselves as liberal (i.e. left-wing in American terms) are more prone to depression than those who perceive themselves as conservative. The saddest people in the USA are therefore young left-wing women.

But Why?

According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, young girls use social media disproportionately often. As Haidt points out together with Greg Lukianoff in his book about a disastrous "coddling" mentality, the unhappiness of the new generations also results from the false imperatives "Always trust your feelings" and "Life is a battle between good and bad people". These basic principles are promoted by social media on the one hand, but are also widespread in the left-wing university environment that promotes "safe spaces".

Author Jill Filipovic also blames young people's rhetoric of victimhood and vulnerability for the thought-provoking study results: "Almost everything researchers know about resilience and psychological well-being suggests that people who feel they are the main architects of their own lives ... are far better off than people whose default position is to be victimized (...)."

Journalist Matthew Yglesias finds a similar explanation, warning against the habit of permanent catastrophizing. Instead of saying "So-and-so made me angry by doing X", we should say, as if we were responsible for our own emotions, "So-and-so did X, and I reacted to it with anger".