Lisa Simpson Becomes Holden Caulfield

Why young women and girls are so depressed, part 1

The teen years are tough. The awkwardness, the hormones, the acne, the tyrannical pecking orders — most of us are rightly glad when adulthood arrives to rescue us from it all. But not all adolescences are created equal. Teenagerhood in the 2020s seems to be especially bad, with rates of teen mental illness catastrophically skyrocketing since the early 2010s. The crisis is hitting girls especially hard: emergency room visits for suicide attempts have spiked more than 50% for girls just since 2019, compared with only four percent for boys. Nearly 60% of teen girls reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021, and nearly one-third seriously contemplated suicide. These are staggering, and heartbreaking, numbers. What’s going on?

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Warning: the essays ahead (this is Part 1 of a series) discuss gender and sex differences as if they were real things grounded partly in biology, not mere social constructs. If that’s likely to ruin your day, I suggest doing something better with your time. Take a walk in the woods. Poke at pond critters with sticks. Ride a bike. Anything that’ll make for a better memory at the very end of your life than getting outraged again on the internet.

This is a pretty good decision-making heuristic in general, in fact.

A flurry of articles have recently appeared trying to make sense of the teen mental health crisis. In his Substack After Babel, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that young women and girls are suffering from excessive social media use, which alienates teens from in-person contact with friends and peers and ratchets up destructive social comparisons. He also thinks that girls in particular are vulnerable to “reverse” cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) — unhelpful messages imparted by teachers, media, and peers that encourage teens to see themselves as victims, to assume harmful intent on the part of others, and to trust their inner feelings without scrutiny. (Real CBT reduces depression and anxiety by training patients to do exactly the opposite of these things.)

The hypothesis that social media use is crushing teens’ mental health gets a lot of airtime, and there’s probably truth to it. But I’m more interested in Haidt’s other proposal — that teen girls are imbibing poor messaging from schools, media, and other trusted institutions, and this messaging leads them to process the world in ways that undermine well-being. This explanation makes better sense of the fact that it’s specifically liberal teen girls who are suffering the brunt of the mental health crisis, because liberal or progressive values currently predominate in spaces where teens congregate and social values are transmitted, such as schools, social media, and youth-oriented advertising (although not necessarily in statehouses). These progressive values have their merits, but they’re also robustly associated with poorer mental health outcomes — especially for girls. The kids who internalize their messages may be liable to suffer more than those who don’t.

And the kids who are internalizing them are girls.

Girls as Social Barometers

The fact is that girls are now far more liberal than boys, and young women are much more liberal than young men. It wasn’t always this way. Before the 1980s, male college students were actually more liberal, on average, than their female counterparts, and throughout the 1980s the spread was about even. But starting in 1987, college women became more likely to self-identify as liberal than college men, and the gap has only grown since then. It’s too simplistic to say that today’s culture wars are actually a gender war, but the idea isn't completely nuts, either.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. The tendency for girls to glom onto society’s values a bit quicker than boys helps explain why, in the majority of countries, women are reliably more religious than men. Most societies are basically religious and traditional; both boys and girls in such societies unconsciously learn that being religious is normative and morally desirable. They absorb religiosity through osmosis from families (especially parents and grandparents), schools, and churches, mosques, or temples. But girls, who tend to be a bit more socially agreeable, more conscientious, and more strongly motivated to live up to social expectations than boys (an effect that, like other gender differences, may paradoxically be stronger in more gender-equal countries), seem to internalize such traditional messages on average more quickly and comprehensively. This makes girls a sort of collective barometer of society’s central values.

I don’t mean to imply that girls are somehow more gullible than boys, or even that these sex differences necessarily stem innately from evolutionary psychology. A lot of these differences, maybe most or even all of them, probably instead have to do with the simple fact that women rely on social norms and constraints for personal safety to an extent that most men don’t grasp. One of the most important non–socially constructed differences between men and women is upper body strength. The distribution curves for men and women barely overlap — the average man is stronger than 99% of women. So being a woman means knowing that any random man on the street could just lunge out at you at any time, and unless there were concerned bystanders nearby with strong, internalized social norms against randomly attacking women — as well as, hopefully, legal systems that put attackers in prison — you’d be in deep trouble. The more widely accepted the social norms are, the less danger you face from men.¹

So there are good reasons for women to be drawn to social rules and norms. The key, though, is this: in America, the “official” norms — the ones you find in the media, mainstream news, and schools — have switched from being relatively conservative and religious (by WEIRD standards) before the 1980s to being overwhelmingly, even aggressively liberal and secular, or post-WEIRD, today. (Interestingly, it’s overwhelmingly white, educated liberals, a group that’s radicalized remarkably in recent years, who have spearheaded this shift.)

So, while conservatives may have plenty of clout in private life and Republicans dominate many state governments, the normative messaging from American schools, media, and federal government in the 2020s is now overwhelmingly secular, progressive, and technocratic. These institutions envision progress, technology, individualism, equality, and liberation triumphing over oppressive old social structures and hierarchies, making way for a just, equitable world. In the public square, this ideology has decisively vanquished the older Protestant vision of succeeding in life by pleasing God, exercising self-discipline, respecting one’s ancestors, and not knowing how to dance.

As sociologist Christian Smith has argued, it’s literally been a revolution. In particular, it’s a revolution in our anthropology. Our culture’s old view of human nature saw people as essentially family-bound, social, fallible, groupish animals who lived in nested institutions, from marriage to church to government, that were ultimately supposed to help families survive and prosper. The new anthropology, by contrast, sees humans as highly autonomous. It takes a utilitarian, instrumental view of relationships and institutions, and where it acknowledges groups, it mainly emphasizes identity categories — black, white, immigrant, LGBTQ — instead of organically structured communities (like churches or nations). This is why mainstream newspapers and schools now make lots of references to protected identity classes, but remain mostly pretty dismissive of religion. And while the old anthropology is still found tucked away in private spheres such as religious sects, our prestigious secular institutions are almost unanimously committed to the new view of human nature. With the dust settling, the secular-progressive worldview is now the correct one to hold for anybody who wants a respectable career or position in society. A social barometer for mainstream America would point, not toward Christianity, but toward it.

So young girls are naturally converting to it. Just as girls in conservative countries are quicker than boys to take up and internalize the locally dominant religious values, American girls today are leading the rush into the newly dominant secular-progressive worldview because it’s simply what teachers and cultural authorities are preaching. The “correct” values have shifted, and girls’ values are following suit accordingly.

Call it the Lisa Simpson explanation.

Lisa Simpson: Front-Row Kid

Lisa Simpson, the middle child in the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons, is famously bookish, ambitious, intelligent, and liberal. She dreams of attending an elite university, and she’s often depicted in future cutaways as a successful, professional woman — even the first female president. But when she’s unexpectedly forced to stay home from school, the sudden lack of constant praise from teachers (hilariously) triggers violent withdrawal symptoms. Her craving for morally superiority, her need to be more enlightened than her peers, provide fodder for some of the show’s best recurring gags. (For the record, she’s my favorite character.)

In short, Lisa is a teacher’s pet. She lives for that delicious feeling of validation that comes from giving the answer the teacher — or the professor, or scientific authority, or cultural leader — wants. Lisa rightly expects to be successful, so she easily susses out the most prestigious or approved ethics, the correct views, in elite circles. Since she lives in a cartoon version of the globalized, idealistic, liberal-democratic American empire, this instinct inevitably leads her to a progressive, ethically universalist value system that elevates, say, animal rights and environmentalism over Abrahamic religion or patriotism.

Because as most people who went through public school since the 1980s can attest, the kids who do best at school, who are the teacher’s pets, really do tend to gravitate to exactly this kind of worldview. This is no surprise, because public school teachers are, on average, very liberal. Kids who thrive at pleasing them get to matriculate at good universities where the cosmopolitan, autonomy–and-environmentalism worldview is approved and rewarded, and they usually don’t move back. (Lisa Simpson thinks Springfield, her hometown, is about as cool as daytime television.)

By contrast, C students historically were immune to the gravitational pull of this worldview, if only because they didn’t understand or much care what teachers wanted them to think. They’d stick around after graduation and work at the gas station, right? They didn’t care which opinions the New York Times set currently held, because that set was and is composed almost exclusively of former A students, or “front row” kids, as the journalist Chris Arnade calls them. This might not be as true in the age of social media saturation, since even C students are now exposed to messaging online, but it was the historic dynamic.

And it matters because, increasingly, today’s front row kids are female. In fact, girls now outperform boys all levels of American education, getting better grades in elementary and high school and comprising a near-supermajority of students in college and doctoral programs. Lisa Simpson was originally cast as a misfit, a talented but hopeless nerd who couldn’t relate to her normie peers. But we’re living in the Revenge of the Nerds now, and Lisa has gone mainstream. As girls increasingly set the tone for schools and colleges, any tendency they might have to preferentially absorb normative values, to attune to what the teacher (writ large) wants to hear, has begun to ramify into a mass phenomenon. The progressive, post-Christian, technocratic worldview that dominates in those spaces is increasingly female-biased as a result.

This, then, is my in-a-nutshell explanation for why girls and young women have become so much more liberal than their male counterparts in recent years. The state religion changed, and girls, sniffing out the change more quickly than boys and disproportionately excelling in culture-making institutions, have converted en masse to the new faith.

But this doesn’t explain why the purveyors of this new creed would be more unhappy.

The rest of this essay and those that will follow it will focus on answering this question.

Medium and Message

Researchers have suggested many explanations for the so-called ideological “happiness gap” between liberals and conservatives. Social scientists, who overwhelmingly lean left themselves, favor the view that conservatives conveniently overlook the injustice in the world, justifying the status quo so they can enjoy capitalism guilt-free. This makes them happier than liberals, who are plagued by their honest inability to look away from the world’s evils. Others point out that liberal-progressive ideology tends to downplay personal agency, depicting people instead as pawns of impersonal forces — a view that’s empirically linked with poorer mental health, even if you think it’s true. By this logic, conservatives are happier because they see themselves as having agency.

There’s probably some truth to both these hypotheses. But I want to look at three additional ideas that haven’t gotten as much attention, yet which I think are playing an important hidden role in the collapse of teens’, and especially teen girls’, mental health along ideological lines. I’ll tackle the first idea in the remainder of this post, then the other two in subsequent essays.

As usual for me, these ideas reflect a possibly foolhardy willingness to scoop up and smoosh together insights from a whole lot of fields in which my expertise is frankly minimal, but at least in ways that no one else seems to have scooped or smooshed them before. So, you know, fair warning. Everything that follows also reflects a combined biological and cultural — a biocultural — perspective. Speaking naturalistically, humans are animals who’ve hit on complex symbolic culture as our hallmark solution to the universal problems of life: survival, mating, raising offspring. Everything else follows from that.

Now, let’s see what I think is screwing up our liberal young people’s lives.

Idea #1: No Legitimate Roles Means No Growing Up or Self-Regulation

I’ll put it bluntly: the new hegemonic worldview simply can’t provide the inputs that humans need to become stable, self-regulating grownups. A subset of social psychology called social investment theory offers compelling evidence that humans psychologically mature and learn self-regulation by taking on roles that require responsibility. You become more conscientious after you get that first real job or agree to direct the choir at church; or you grow in psychological stability after you get married and have to deal with the reality of living with a person who isn’t you.

As our society becomes more individualistic and less traditional, though, fewer of these roles or responsibilities are available or seem compelling. For example, marriage rates have collapsed since the early 2010s. Today, proportionally fewer Americans are living with married partners than at any other point in the nation’s history.

As once-common roles and institutions lose their hold on us, we find ourselves liberated from traditional culture’s often harsh pressures to conform. But we’re also left without clear expectations about what maturity means or how to get there. As a result, each generational cohort in the United States may be becoming more immature than the last.

The idea that socially imposed roles and conventional responsibilities could mature our personalities might be hard to accept for those of us raised in our fiercely individualistic, post-Protestant American culture. But the self isn’t some stable, sacred, timeless entity that persists unchanged beneath the ebb and flow of social niceties. Instead, social input changes the self. As both Aristotle and the psychologist William James argued, our regular actions over time — our habits — help define who we become. But for the vast majority of human existence, the habits that defined us were socially sourced, inherited, and mostly unchosen. These “ascribed” social roles were constraining, sure. But they did give us clear, agreed-upon templates for how to act, responsibilities to fill, that fed back to affect our psychology by altering how we habitually behaved and handled our responsibilities.

Given how intensely cultural human nature is, this process may even baked into our genes. One of my grad school mentors, the anthropologist Rich Sosis, has argued that our brains and bodies are primed adaptively to soak up cultural values and roles during the sensitive period of adolescence. In my own work, I’ve argued that these roles — and the rituals that define them — help set the parameters for our own growth and identity formation.

From Critique to Holden Caulfield

Crucially, though, we only buy into roles and identities we believe in. If our tribe or nation and its values — the expectations and responsibilities it imposes on us — seem illegitimate or untrustworthy, we’ll naturally be a lot more skeptical of the roles it offers us. People who think marriage is a tool of bourgeois oppression that props up the evil capitalist patriarchy don’t tend to get married.

Yet since around 2012, the public culture and schools that are shaping today’s Lisa Simpsons have taken a sharp turn toward critiquing, even rejecting, formerly established culture and institutions. Continuing from the last example, there’s been a near-constant barrage of highbrow and pop-culture content critiquing or cleverly downplaying marriage as an institution. (I’ve lost count of the number of Atlantic think pieces along these lines, whose authors somehow always see themselves as courageous outsiders. It doesn’t get more American than this, folks.) This is despite reams of evidence showing that, all things being equal, marriage overwhelmingly benefits mental health. Yet, as we’ve seen, fewer and fewer young people are actually getting married — almost as if lots of prestigious cultural authorities had spent years telling them that marriage was lame and outdated!

A more focused example might be the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1619 Project, which as of 2020 was official curriculum material in more than 4,500 schools (and is now a series on Hulu). The project teaches that the United States was founded, not to protect liberty and embark on a bold, epochal experiment in democratic self-government, but as self-interested bid to protect slavery from the British, who were hinting they wanted to ban it. The 1619 Project’s authors don’t much admire the American Founders, since they see today’s social problems as mostly stemming from a long legacy of racism that (they argue) rests at the very core of the country’s identity.

Now, racism has certainly stained our country from the beginning, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author, rightly argues that black Americans have often uniquely pushed for America to live up to its ideals. I’m not saying that there wasn’t and isn’t plenty of work to be done. But to equate the country with racism means rejecting many other traits that we’ve traditionally seen as equally foundational to our identity — such as democratic ideals, hands-on practicality, and religious tolerance. One could be forgiven, then, for inferring that the 1619 Project is about not just coming to terms with some of the evils in our collective past (a laudable goal), but rather chipping away at the self-confidence of the United States, even its worthiness to command citizens’ loyalties.

And like the delegitimization of marriage in pop culture, it is working — according to a recent poll, 40% of Gen Z respondents now see the American Founders as “villains” rather than heroes. (The 1619 Project isn’t solely responsible for this, of course; it’s just emblematic of a sea change in how the story of our country is being told.)²

Forget for a moment about firebrand conservative state governors trying to ban the 1619 Project from schools. The fact is that countries don’t work if no one believes in them. You need a baseline of good in your collective story for people to invest in the group; it doesn’t have to be rah-rah patriotism, but a laser focus on collective sins and evils will torch people’s loyalty. And its effect on impressionable, morally sensitive young people is catastrophic. If, as a young teen, you believe that the country you happen to live in is ethically rotten at its core, where on earth will you find the motivation to accept the roles it asks you to step into?

The answer is simple: you won’t. If you don’t feel that you’re growing up into something that’s at least decently good, then the future ahead will seem to lead nowhere. Instead of investing in the community, you’ll gravitate toward what psychologist Erik Erickson called a negative identity, a rebellious stance toward society and its norms. Think Holden Caulfield, the cynical antihero of The Catcher in the Rye, slouching through Manhattan, convinced that the adult world is all phony. Now scale it up to an entire generation.

Nowhere Else to Turn

Of course, if there were viable replacements for the older institutions and identities, then kids might not be as lost as they are. Or if there were other thriving tribes or layers of civil society that could step in and offer other roles, other inputs for helping people psychologically mature, then the mass delegitimization of America and its institutions might not be such a blow to kids’ mental health. But the radical cultural critique that’s captured education and media specializes in deconstruction. It’s not as good at offering constructive alternatives. And alternative sources of formation and identity stemming from civil society, particularly religious communities and extended families, are also falling apart as people turn away from them and society rapidly secularizes.

Kids, then, are growing up in an environment where fewer and fewer institutions or sources of identity seem morally legitimate. They might be right to be skeptical of our society’s historically rosy self-image, but mass delegitimization has very real impacts on individuals. It means that we lose the regulative social inputs that normally would awaken psychological maturity. And people who fail to mature typically suffer a lot more depression, emotional instability, and other forms of distress than those who do eventually grow up.

Lisa’s Dark Night of the Soul

Now that the default stance in schools and establishment media is critique or delegitimization of social institutions and the country, the weird irony is that the most trusting, obedient, and credulous kids — the Lisa Simpsons — may be at special risk of succumbing to radical cynicism, of Holden Caulfield Syndrome. If so, then being a good student could conceivably be losing some of its normally protective effects on mental health.

In times like these, it might in some cases be better to be a C student. It’s probably not coincidence, then, that boys are both doing more poorly in school than girls and also less susceptible to left-liberal discourse. It’s not a good thing in itself that boys are losing interest in school (and indeed, in formal society at large). But it may at least be offering boys some immunity against the new propaganda and its uprooting effects.

To sum up, then: one important contributor to the growing divide between boys’ and girls’ well-being — a gap that, like some psychological differences, is actually wider in liberal, gender-equal societies — may be that girls are disproportionately exposed to the new ideological messaging. This is both because women and girls now dominate the ranks of the academically successful and because they’re a bit more sensitive to moral and religious messaging coming from cultural authorities.

There are obviously many factors at play in the crisis of young people’s mental health, and I’m not arguing that this “Lisa Simpson meets cultural revolution” explanation is the most important. I just think it’s under-appreciated, considering how many phenomena — the happiness gap between boys and girls, the increasing ideological gap between young men and women, the collapse of trust in institutions and declining marriage rates — it helps account for. In the next essay, I’ll look more specifically at how this dynamic may be affecting young people’s dating and mating experiences, which has obvious implications for well-being. After that, I’ll focus on the breakdown of higher-level cultural and multigenerational identities and the effects this has on mental health. In the concluding essay, I’ll zoom out to the big picture and examine ways the church can help stabilize and provide roots for otherwise uprooted young people — especially women and girls. Our post-WEIRD culture needs all the help it can get.

1. Until, that is, culture embarks on a sexual revolution, in which case the new social norms become much more of a mixed bag for most women because the mating/dating scene becomes more like a Wild West where only high-status men benefit, and everyone else loses. But that’s the topic of the next essay in this series.

2. Serious Marxists or leftists might complain that most of the deconstruction and cultural critique we’re seeing from establishment institutions is purely performance and cynical — and of course they’d be right. The problem is that this doesn’t matter at all as far as how it affects normal people. If a bunch of mainstream cultural authorities start signaling that the United States is irredeemably corrupt and institutions like marriage are oppressive holdovers from a patriarchal past, it doesn’t matter how many of their copywriters and PR execs are just blowing smoke versus how many are true believers in the revolution. The effects on the audience will be the same, because the message is the same. And the effects are becoming obvious.