By: Stephen McAlpine
On the surface it seems astounding: Australian young people are among the worst affected by the mental health crisis that is reverberating around the globe since the COVID pandemic hit.
On the surface, astounding, but beneath the surface I get it.
As reported in The Australian newspaper, The Lancet Psychiatry journal has just released its long-awaited report on mental health, and the results are, well, they’re gloomy.
As The Australian reports:
“In Australia, there has been a 50 per cent increase in diagnosable mental health conditions among 16 to 25-year-olds since 2007, with two out of five young people and almost one in two young women being affected. Similar trends in the US led the US Surgeon General to sound the alarm in 2022, labelling it a “youth mental health crisis”.”
A 50 per cent increase! How can this be? you might ask, given that we live in a country, which compared to the rest of the world across space and time is knocking it out of the park? Especially when it comes to opportunity, safety, wealth, longevity, climate and a whole bunch of other indicators.
Yet here we are. Patrick McGorry, professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and director of Orygen Youth Health, says in his article:
“The [Lancet] commission has identified a range of megatrends, notably the increased precarity of young people’s existence due to burgeoning intergenerational wealth inequality, student debt, insecure work, unaffordable housing and rental costs, climate change, and harmful effects of social media.”
Megatrends.
In other words, things that will not go away quickly. Not simply situational matters that resolve. Those listed above, incidentally, are primarily Western concerns. Maybe not all, but I suspect the average villager in north west Nigeria is more concerned about the imminent raid my extremist Boko Haram – the Islamic jihadist militia – to be too worried about generational wealth.
McGorry makes this statement: “Something fundamental must have changed in society to account for such a crisis.”
A Subterranean Earthquake
Could I suggest that McGorry and Lancet et al are looking at symptoms of a deeper crisis, rather than the more fundamental underlying matters?
After all, if you lived in the shadow of 1939 in Europe, and if you had gone through the next five to six years, you would be experiencing situations the equal of, if not worse, than what we are experiencing today.
That of course is not to demean what is going on here. And as someone whose wife is a clinician, I can tell you that if you can’t get a booking for the next month there’s little chance of you getting one in the next six months.
But as I write in my latest book Futureproof: How to Live For Jesus in A Culture That is Always Changing, I make the observation that underpinning so much of our anxiety is a crisis of meaning and purpose, which means that it is well beyond the reach of a change of circumstance. Something deeper is going on.
There is a subterranean earthquake occurring that has rendered our society anxiety to the core. And it’s centred around the loss of a meaning and purpose. Miroslav Wolf nailed this when he stated:
“The idea of flourishing as a human being has shrivelled to meaning no more than leading an experientially satisfying life. The sources of satisfaction may vary: power, possessions, love, religion, sex, food, drugs – whatever. What matters the most is not the source of satisfaction, but the experience of it – my satisfaction. Our satisfied self is our best hope.”
You see, when those sources dry up, or when they are threatened at least, what else is there to turn to? If the goal of human flourishing is human flourishing, then we are locked into a endlessly looping Mobius Strip of despair.
Let’s face it, while we have some major issues to resolve, there are also major changes that are positive – at least from the culture’s perspective on this. Never have we been so free to choose from whatever experiences we want to – all within the bounds of consent of course.
There is nothing that is supposedly able to be withheld from us. And what is intriguing is that the same cohort that is going through these crises today, will largely attend schools that, during their graduation event, will be told that the world is their oyster. That the point of their lives is to “You Do You“.
The Mental Health Olympics
Yet as my wife observed while watching the Olympics before last (the Tokyo games): “Anxiety is the gold medal winner in the mental health games, and that was before COVID.”
She went on to describe it as a mental health “tsunami”. And it has surely reached out shores.
In the years leading up to 2019 and the start of 2020, anxiety levels were through the roof with our young people, and then the adults in the room stopped adulting and just started throwing furniture around. And these were, as McGorry points out, in the transition years of young people.
And speaking of transitions, it’s not wonder that we get Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria in these years. Faced with a bleak outlook, and a sense of meaningless and a “your identity is yours to decide” from adults who should know better, is it any wonder that many young people are struggling?
The second half of Futureproof tackles four of the major anxiety issues we are facing today: Technology, Polarisation, Climate Change, and The Culture Wars, and it explains how we can flourish as God’s people in the midst of this.
But these chapters are predicated on certain convictions that the first half of the book deals with, and an integral conviction is fleshed out in chapter 2: Out-purpose The Culture. Simply put, the biggest crisis – the real megatrend in the West, is the vanishing meaning and purpose framework that enabled previous generations to focus on the crises at hand with a centre that we no longer hold to.
Here’s what I say:
“Given all this autonomy to be ourselves and find our true purpose in life with fewer and fewer social and moral impediments to trip us up along the yellow brick road, and given that we live in a society that has vast amounts of creative resources and finances to mould the narratives that shape us, we would assume that everyone is pretty much living their best lives now. Everyone must be making authentic hay while their individual sun shines, right? Wrong! In fact, we are facing a tsunami of anxiety, especially among younger people, and especially around matters of meaning and purpose in life. Something is not working. Something is broken. The rates of worry and depression we are experiencing are off the charts.”
The Fragile Modern Self
Now this is not to say that Christians do not succumb to depression, so don’t hear me saying that. But what we do have in the midst of our worries, our anxieties and our mental health battles, is a framework that holds us up in the midst of the storm.
Tim Keller, writing in The Atlantic shortly before his death, made this prescient observation:
“The modern self is exceptionally fragile. While having the freedom to define and validate oneself is superficially liberating, it is also exhausting: You and you alone must create and sustain your identity. This has contributed to unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety and never-satisfied longings for affirmation.”
Do we live in a time when the problems are palpably worse than before? That’s debatable surely. But what is beyond debate is that we have been told for two to three decades that the primary locus of your meaning and purpose in the midst of a chaotic world is within yourself. I mean, who else, or what else, can you trust?
And sadly, when you pull that “self” lever and it breaks off in your hands, where do you go from there? Keller is right. Sure the conditions are poor across many data points at the moment (although Steven Pinker would say otherwise), but combine that with a fragile self, built up the false edifice of expressive individualism, and boom!
Sadly, after being told that we all deserve what we wish for, and then it not coming to fruition, there is bound to be a huge letdown. And some of that letdown is bleeding into our young people especially and coming out in the form of deep anxiety and despair.
McGorry is right, something fundamental has changed in society to account for such a crisis. Aside from all the external markers – good and ill – the centre of meaning, purpose and identity has shifted to our interior selves.
And when things were going reasonably well, then the fair-weather friend of “You Do You” and expressive individualism predicated upon the assumption that you would be in control of your life and its decisions, did us well.
Yet here we are. Our problem is that culturally, sociologically, spiritually and psychologically, we have been building a boat for fair weather.
And now foul weather has arrived.
And we have few tools with which to deal with this internally, which is why we are going to do as McGorry suggests, throw billions of dollars more at attempting to put the mother of all band-aids over the top of it.
The Christ of the Storm
Once again, don’t hear me saying that anxiety and depression are not something that Christians experience. I’ve been there myself and it was a brutal, beguiling and becalming experience in my life. It took all my strength to even get up, for months on end. Have a read of the link and you’ll see what I mean.
But here is what is interesting: one of the common motifs of Christian art down the centuries, is that of a boat in a storm. With Jesus at the helm.
Something about the story of Jesus calming the wind and waves as his frightened disciples call out “Master, don’t you care that we drown?” surely stuck in the imagination of the early Christians living among the brutality and privations of the Roman Empire. And that image has wended its way to us: Jesus, the captain in the storm.
This is the same Jesus who told his “little flock” in the Sermon on the Mount not to be anxious about the things that the pagans ran after, which can be summed up as the need for external security markers. These will come and go. And currently many of them are gone.
How Will The Church Guide the Way?
The question I leave us with is how will the church point a way forward in the midst of this? For those, such as my wife who is a clinician, it will be by offering quality clinical services to those who are suffering. It also means not giving trite answers to those people – Christian or otherwise who are suffering in the midst of the mental health crisis.
It will also means Christians holding positions in the public square and in institutions in which they can bring true proverbial and godly wisdom to bear on the situations, coupled with the compassion of those who value all humans as dignified and worthy.
Bear that last point in mind. We’ve already had the first documented and, sadly, celebrated, case of a young woman in the Netherlands who has offered and accepted state-sanctioned suicide for her ailing and persistent mental health issues. Is that the culture of death we want?
Most of all it will mean a church that offers meaning, purpose and a future beyond ourselves. As I say in Futureproof:
“…as Christians, who are called not to be anxious both by Jesus and the New Testament writers, we have a sure foundation for the future, grounded in the resurrection and return of King Jesus. Our King is one day coming to rescue his subjects, and he will usher in a new creation. This should make it possible for Christians to banish that crippling society-wide anxiety, replacing it with hope and confidence.”
I truly believe that there are great gospel opportunities for us in the midst of this. Not merely for those of us who do not suffer anxiety, and people ask us why we’re above it. But for those of us who, in the midst of our suffering, still cling tightly to Jesus despite the tsunami wave assailing us.
Such people may be the most effective gospel witnesses, because they are convinced that their Master does care about them in the midst of the storm, and loves them enough to save them from the eternal depths.
Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine
About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. He is the lead pastor of Providence Church Midland, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture. Stephen and his family live in Perth’s eastern suburbs, where his wife Jill runs a clinical psychology practice.