Social Media and the Loss of Community

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com . Welcome back to the Gen Z Story. It's me, Vicki Sprat. This week we're looking at young people's mental health. This is one of the most important aspects of this series, but it was also the most difficult to cover. One in five young people in the UK is currently suffering from a mental health problem. This issue clearly matters to you.red Hsund of trip listeners wrote in to tell us about their thoughts on the issue. This episode is a little bit different to what you've heard before because we've actually got three guests. They've all got a slightly different take on the Gen Z mental health story. We've got the Oxford psychologist who specializes in adolescent mental health. We've got the young woman who has written a book about her experiences of growing up online. And we've got the young man, a researcher who's been traveling the UK and speaking to thousands of young people about their experiences. We're going to be asking some difficult questions in this episode. Is there an overdiagnosis problem with young people? Has therapy culture gone too far? Or have today's young adults been let down by the housing crisis, relatively low wages, and expensive university education? So are they struggling or are they snowflakes? That's what we'll ex plore in this episode of the Gen Z mental health story. We'll start by talking to Dr. Lucy Folkes. She's an Oxford University psychologist who specializes in adolescent mental health. I asked her why she thinks young people's mental health diagnoses have skyrocketed over the last 20 years. There's a lot of explanations for what's happening and lots of things are changing in parallel. So more people are reporting that they have symptoms in surveys, more people are seeking help for these problems, and more people are getting diagnosed. And it's not straightforward why that is happening. It's a total cultural transformation in talking about these problems. So that's one component of it. But then also there's uh the component that things are um and it's these explanations aren't competing, uh that things really are worse and that there are factors uh for young people that are different now relative to generations in the past. There's more information about mental health online than ever before . But might that also have led to more people self diagnosing with mental health problems? People have been interested in mental health and even, you know, reporting that mental health problems are increasing for, you know, a hundred years, but certainly in the last twenty , thirty years, there has been this explosion in interest in mental health and in framing our difficulties and our challenges in the language of mental health and the language of psychiatry that has become very normalized today, and it wasn't happening in the uh in the 90s. Really, if you were going to use uh the language of psychiatry, really that was for people who were very unwell and and you really didn't want to talk about it openly. That has completely shifted now. Generally if people are unhappy, they're more likely to talk about being depressed. If they use terms like OCD and PTSD very casually. And actually the it seems like these psychiatric disorders now have a kind of parallel use. So there is a lot of understanding about what these disorders really are because people have educated themselves via the internet. So people are now accurately saying that they have OCD, for example, but also they are casually using this language almost as kind of a joke or just as a kind of uh catch all term for being um tidy or obsessive, for example. And if you and we interviewed young people and they're not naive to this, they know that there is these kind of two parallel usages happen. But really, in the past, and it's it's happening in relationships as well. So in the past, we might have just not um being compatible with someone, but now we tend to say that they're avoid ant or that they're a narcissist. You know, we're we're we're borrowing these terms that used to be reserved uh for psychiatry and psychologists. So there's all this awareness of mental health now, but is there a risk that we might start going backwards in the conversation? Yeah, and I think that's something very interesting that's happening, that we've seen almost a kind of backlash towards people using this language and uh and it's happening amongst um young people te,enagers as well. And when we interviewed teenagers to understand what they thought about self-diagnosis, it was fascinating because they had very nuanced perspectives on it, but they kind of police each other. So there's a set of unspoken rules about what they think is a legitimate case of a person saying they have a diagnosis and what isn't. So for example, they think if a person seems to have spent a long time thinking about it, then that's legitimate. But if they seem to be saying it too readily, then that's treated with suspicion. So there is this um judgment ? There's also a sense that people are allowed to use this language um as a temporary hypothesis en route to going to a uh professional, but you're treated with um suspicion if you think the self-diagnosis bit is uh sufficient. So there's a lot of this policing and judgment. Um there's and there absolutely is a backlash because people are becoming uh uh worried about saying they have self-diagnosis and you see this in forums online they say i'm like i think i might have this i'm not trying to self-diagnose because they know that that backlash is coming. And there's also been some interesting data showing that public attitudes towards people with mental health problems improved from about 2009 to about 2019, 2020. And then it started to decrease again. So it's so it's that you can see the the line on the graph very clearly peaking, and then it's starting to go back down again. So I think that really does um speak to the possibility that people are feeling saturated by these ideas, they're feeling uh fed up of people using this language too readily, and they're treating their peers with scepticism and scorn for doing it, which is a massive problem because we still haven't actually resolved the problem, which is that people experiencing these problems are not getting access to support that actually helps them feel better. So it's like we've had this awareness or the willingness to talk about it. And then the backlash has started before we've actually improved the problem. So yeah, it's um it's a massive issue, I think, at the moment . It's really interesting to hear from Lucy about her research and some of the challenges, unintended as they might be, that are now arising when it comes to how we deal with young people's mental health. But there's a real danger of talking too much to older people about young people. So our next guest is Shu eb Gamot. He's 26 years old, he's a researcher, and he's been traveling the UK. What's great about his work is that he's been speaking to his own generation about how they think and feel about everything that is going on in the world around them. He's compiled two reports. One is inside the mind of a 16-year-old, and the other is inside the mind of a neat, that's someone who's not in education, employment, or training. We had some really, really interesting conversations about the rejection economy, about learned helplessness and about a place in Europe that he thinks might just be able to show Britain the way forward . Shweb Gamot, welcome to the Gen Z story for the rest is politics. Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. What is going on and what made you decide to spend your time looking into this? In terms of why I was really interested in this topic, off the back of our last report, I think one of the key things that came up is there was a lot of nihilism among young young young people about their future and work was a big part of that. Not having the confidence to believe that like they they can do what they want to do and go into the industries that they want to go in. So we spent the last four months kind of really going around the country, we've been to 20 different cities, um, spoken to over 400 young people, doing like a deep listening exercise, getting behind their kind of motivations for work. Do they actually want to work? You know, w what's missing? And um and I think the report really kind of illuminates that. And you just described this nihilism that you picked up when you were doing the first report. Wouldn't normally expect sixteen year-olds to be particularly nihilistic about the future, which is essentially feeling like there's no point to work hard, there's no point in doing anything, scorched earth, like nothing really matters or means anything. What what were you picking up? from them Why were they telling you that that's how they were feeling? So in the first report, we spoke to kind of like 16 and 17-year-olds. And at that point in their lives, all of them were in education. So all of the young people that we spoke to were in sixth form in college. And quite naturally, school is usually quite an optimistic environment where teachers are trying to tell the young people that they're working with that they their future is going to be bright. They can go to university, they can live good lives. However, when we asked them about stuff like housing , when we ask them what they're really kind of um depressed about at the moment, what's making them feel like this country is going in the wrong direction, they would list things like cost of living crisis. A lot of young people believe they'll never own a home in their lifetime. At the age of 16, because of all the kind of signals that they've been sent throughout their lives, whether it be kind of headlines or the conversations in school and in politics and A levels or in economics, those conversations were leading them to believe that financially We hear Gen Z in particular described as snowflakes, not resilient enough, really locating problems in in young people. To what extent do you think it's the structures that young people are growing up with and experiencing? And to what extent do you think something has fundamentally shifted in young people? I think it's a mixture of both. In our last report we talked about kind of the moral panic around young people and we talked about, you know, the labelling of snowflake, etc. and all the nonsense that kind of that the average headline shows you about Gen Z. What we actually found is like, in my opinion, this is one of the most resilient generations that have ever that's ever been. They face so many different crises over a short period of time. And there's an interesting way of thinking about it. There's this re-research on psychologist called Skyla Scanlon and we talked about her in inside the mind of a 16-year-old. But she outlines how thinking about one generation is one generation, so Gen Z is Gen Z is more useless than ever . And she kind of outlines three kind of Gen Z archetypes. So Gen Z 1.0, Gen Z 1.5, and Gen Z 2.0. So Gen Z 1.0, I'm a member of Gen Z 1.0, grew up with kind of organic social media, maybe Facebook , where your four you page actually ended. And by the way, when we talk to young people about the concept of a four you page ending, or it wasn't even a four you page, well your Facebook page ending, it kind of really shocked them that there was no such thing as endless scrolling. You couldn't just scroll all night. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be if you've got 50 friends, you're done within 10 minutes. Um, and for me, Facebook was just on my desktop computer at home. And that generation would have had interesting things, obviously, no AI, etc. And then you've got Gen Z one point five, which, you know, YouTube culture starts coming around a lot stronger. You might you have Snapchat. You have again more organic forms of social media. But again, that generation didn't necessarily grow up with AI in school. And then you've got Gen Z two point oh and they've got a whole different technological culture and they face societal differences in a different way. And that's the youngest part of Gen Z, the ones that are you know teenagers very early twenties now. I ha had AI in high school, you know , had algorithmic social media which they know is addictive and it's really interesting that they know they know how addictive it is and they're having to self police themselves in a lot of different ways. A lot of young people told us about going monk mode or kind of monk mode. Yeah. Wait, what's monk mode? I want to hear about this. So monk mode, especially among young men to be honest, would be kind of them realizing that they're not focused enough, maybe. And they would use the term monk mode because it's kind of a manosphere term. It's really interesting what you say, because I've been travelling to a lot of places where there's high youth unemployment, but at the same time not that many good quality jobs. So a good job defined by economists is where there's career progression, possibility of moving up, security, decent pay, but instead in a lot of these places what we find is that they're zero hours work. And I think that's where the kind of the nihilism comes in. Um young people are not looking for like Amazon warehouse jobs, long hours, um, a lack of progression. Because one of the things that we found in our report was this quitting culture. And it's really interesting because on the surface level it seems like quite a negative thing about the young people. But the reason a lot of young people are quitting jobs after a very short period of time is because of exactly what you described. They don't see a future in their roles. Quitting culture, tell me a bit more about that. Because one of the charges that's often levelled at Gen Z by older people is that they can't stick at things. So we did realize the quitting culture, and on the surface, it might seem like a negative thing, and it's probably the most damning thing about Gen Z in this report that we've kind of outlined. Because the majority of the problems that we kind of see are more structural, but specifically on quitting culture. I was we were speaking to a young woman, for example, in Cardiff, and she had been at home for three years doing nothing. Um, she was a carel er and she received income from the the Welsh government because she was a care lever and she was staying at home and finally she started to kind of try to get into get into employment and what she detailed was like leaving loads of different roles. But when you asked her about every single specific role, it seemed like she had quite a good reason to. She was leaving cleaning jobs because they weren't paying her properly and when they were expecting her to do longer hours. She left an overnight job because she didn't work overnight and she was seeing how how much of a negative impact it was having on their mental health. So I think there are kind of clear reasons why young people are quitting different things. For a generation who have been told that their worth is intrinsically linked to the version of their lives that they're able to post and share online, this feeling of worthlessness has really created a problem. He says young people are writing themselves off at such a young age because they feel like they don't have anything to show for themselves. So next up, I spoke to Freya India. She's a 26-year-old writer, and her work, her book, Girls, focuses on the commodification of young women's looks and lives and the impact that that has had on a generation. I started by asking Freya how she would define her generation . I think that we are essentially the same in what we worry about and the problems that we would describe in our lives. So we would probably say it's relationships, it's how we look, it's how we feel, things that previous generations would relate to. But I think what's different about us is we're trying to navigate all of these normal feelings in a very different context with a very different backdrop. And it's actually so new that you can't even describe it to older generations. You can't even find the words. And so I think that adds another layer of difficulty for our generation that it's hard for adults to keep up and keep track and it's hard for What do you think of the idea, as we hear so often, particularly from people on the right, that young adults today are just a bunch of snowflakes who don't know how good they've got it? Yeah, well, I used to think that. I actually used to think that about myself. Again, there's something wrong with me where I am not resilient, I'm not socially confident enough, and I just need to get over it. And I do think there's some truth in that . I do think that a lot of the answers to our anxiety are leaning into the anxiety, forcing yourself to do things that are uncomfortable. So I understand the sort of narrative that you need to be more resilient and you know embrace discomfort a little bit more. But I think what I changed my mind on writing the book was that there's actually so much context to this.' Thsere so many explan ations as to why we would be less resilient and more socially anxious and unsure of ourselves. And I think actually having that context is much more likely to change our behaviour and make us feel more confident than it is to say, you know, you're just a snowflake. We know from the latest statistics in the UK, the adult psychiatric morbidity survey for England, which was carried out very recently, that a quarter of 16 to 24-year-olds have a common mental health condition. That's the highest level observed since records began in 1993. There's so much debate about what's going on with Gen Z's mental health. Do you connect it to social media as a young woman who grew up online? Yeah, I think social media is a huge part of it. My basic argument is that it's a lot of different things. I think that we as a generation had a very unstable foundation in many ways. You know, a lot of us had unstable families. We didn't know our neighbors. We didn't have a sense of community, we're much less religious. And so we had less sources of belonging and security and stability in our lives. And then I think what happened is these social media platforms came along and we're sort of adrift at that time with nothing to anchor us. And what these platforms essentially do is offer a series of simulations and substitutes for these things that we never experienced. And so something that is quite painful about my generation is that we think a community is something like Instagram. And um, you know, we get advice from people on Reddit or we watch YouTube influences because we haven't actually had the experience of knowing our neighbours and having a community. And so I think my argument is not that it's just social media, but I think social media was particularly bad because we were already in a vulnerable position where we didn't have these sort of anchors in life. And so, you know, you're completely right that people can have great interactions online, but I think growing up interacting online and getting very comfortable with an online community and the online way of socializ ing stunts you somehow and it drains the time and the energy that it takes to join a real community. And I often argue that I think for our generation, we're actually not lonely enough because we can use all of these simulations to sort of fill that void a little bit so we can watch a YouTube video instead of going out with friends and it and it's a little hit of connection, but it stops you from actually going out and trying to meet people. How do you cope with all of this? You're not on social media, but you are in an industry that is quite dependent on it. Yeah, of course it's a tension. I think for me the message is really about your personal life and protecting that as much as you can and trying not to market all of your memories and give it all up. But I think social media has changed everything, it's changed every career path. I think every industry you go into , you do have to be the entertainer. You have to be an influencer somewhat. You have to package up your ideas and again make them aesthetic and market them. And so I think I think there are lines you can draw personally So we've heard from three different experts about the Gen Z mental health story, and frankly, what they've all had to say suggests that there's a bit of a problem. As the series we set out to make draws to a close, what's clear is that there is still so much more to say. Your emails, your voice notes, your comments, your concerns, we're reading all of