“The results are in and the science is settled,” as one advocate for a social media ban for under-16s put it. The clearest justification for the imposition of a ban, which passed the Senate last night, is that thanks to the proliferation of social media and smartphones, we are currently raising the most depressed and anxious generation of youngsters in history.
It may be true. But a look through the archives makes us wonder what it says about us if it is.
2000s
In 2004, Queensland’s Sunday Mail warned us that “youth anxiety” was at a “crisis point”, while The Adelaide Advertiser quoted young people who believed that “today’s world is making young people more anxious than ever”.
In 2007, a damning report across the pond that said English kids were the most deprived in the wealthy world prompted Al Aynsley-Green, the children’s commissioner for England, to observe: “There is a crisis at the heart of our society and we must not continue to ignore the impact of our attitudes towards children and young people and the effect that this has on their wellbeing”.
1990s
The 1990s gave plenty of opportunity to fear for the mental well-being of children. There was that ongoing scourge, television. Author Herbert Benson argued: “The electronic revolution has created situations requiring behavioural adjustment that previous generations have never had to face. We sit in our living room and stress comes to us. We learn instantaneously of riots, hurricanes, volcanoes: things that we might never have known about — violence live on television.”
“If the twentieth century ushered in the Age of Anxiety, its exit is witnessing the dawn of the Age of Melancholy,” reported the Austin American-Statesman in 1993. “The first international study of major depression reveals a steady rise in the disorder worldwide.”
It went on:
In some countries the likelihood that people born after 1955 will suffer a major depression — not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection and self-deprecation, as well as an overwhelming sense of hopelessness — at some point in life is more than three times greater than for their grandparents’ generation.
The San Diego Tribune reported on Gen X’s reputation as “apathetic, materialistic beasts of pleasure with attention spans no longer than a sound bite … At other times and in various other circles, they have been called, simply, lost.”
Nirvana was the group that best exemplified this. As their biographer Michael Azerrad concluded, lead singer Kurt Cobain’s “frustration with a shredded homelife, diminished expectations and an increasingly violent society … may explain why [he] became a hero to a generation that was thinking the same thoughts.”
In 1999, the horrors of the Columbine School Shooting unleashed another round of interrogation of this desperate generation. The blame fell, variously, on singer Marilyn Manson, violent video games and social ills. According to the New York Times: “Senator John McCain rued the estrangement of too many parents from their children’s lives, Senator Richard H. Bryan decried the dearth of adequate counseling in schools, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch lamented the absence of prayer in classrooms.”
1960s and 1970s
Perhaps in the defiantly pre-internet peak of the baby boomers we can find an era of peace and joy for the young?
Skipping over the media horror at the “Filth and the Fury” of the punk subculture in the UK, there is the lyrical lament from Joan Didion in 1967’s portrait of hippie subculture, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, in which she chronicles a world where “adolsecents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would now never learn the games which held societies together”.
Meanwhile, Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 election campaign, promised to end the “aimlessness amongst our youth”.
1940s
What about the Greatest Generation? Surely they were fine?
Not according to a first-person piece in The Sun Herald Pictorial, which described them as “the neglected generation”:
I was born between 1918 and 1938. I belong to Australia’s neglected age-group. Surrounded by apparent prosperity, we have reached adulthood and parenthood faced by frustration and something approaching despair — less self-reproachful, but little less dismayed and insecure than the generation which left school in the depression.
1930s
It may surprise you, but there were a few things for young people to be stressed about throughout the 1930s. Some obvious and proximal. In 1937, Western Australia’s Mount Barker and Denmark Record observed the “constant threat to the youth of other nations” posed by the “terrible fratricidal strife in Spain” and concluded that “anxiety has seldom pressed so heavily on the world as it does today”.
Earlier that decade, in 1935, the vice president of the YMCA, visiting Australia, warned that the “youth was filled with depression and bitterness, and sapped of moral strength, not so much by physical want as by the sense of neglect”. And in 1932, the then prince of Wales was moved to tell 10,000 boys and girls: “Depression and apathy are the devil’s own — they are not British, so away with them!”
1910s
Take, finally, this piece from the Lithgow Mercury in 1919, under the one-word headline of “Anxiety”:
Take our own country, and let any man or woman review the last twenty, thirty, or forty years. We are less happy to-day than at any previous time in our history; and what is worse, we are becoming less happy still every year.
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