Gen Z is F*cked: A Letter for Today's College Student

Dear Gen Z College Student,

Your mental health has been supremely fucked over. It isn’t your fault. I would have been just as fucked as you are now had I been born just ten years later. But I was born in the 1980s, which means that my parents let me do dumb shit when I was in single digits, and I didn’t own a smart phone until I was 24 years old. I’ll explain why these two details mean that I’ve been spared while you have not.

I’m a college professor, so I spend all day with college students. When I was just starting out, I taught mostly millennials and the oldest Gen Zers. Now my classrooms are full of Zers and a few precocious Alphas, and everybody is anxious. They’re not a little bit nervous about failing a class or going on a date. They’re filled with ass-puckering existential dread: they’re worried that making a mistake today will spell the end for them. They’re panicked about not belonging in college. They’re afraid that, deep down inside, they are already failures. They’re sure they’ll disappoint their family and friends; that they’re pathetic and lazy; that they’re the only ones who haven’t figured it all out yet. But you already know this.

I noticed the change myself one afternoon when I gave a classroom of first year students an anxiety inventory--the kind you would find in Martin Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't. In it were 10 statements such as, “I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be,” to which students could choose anything from “Almost never” to “Almost Always.” In 10 years of giving this inventory, students have generally scored in the Low to Moderate ranges on this anxiety inventory (as shown in Table 1.1), with an occasional student landing in the severely high box.

 

Table 1.1. Common Distribution of Anxiety Scores Pre-2018

 

Anxiety Level	Number of Students
Low	17
Moderate	12
High	4
Severely High	2

 

I stopped doing the anxiety and depression inventories after a few years, but started up again after the COVID-19 lockdown. I came across them on my computer and though, "Oh yeah, I haven't done these in awhile." The results were so shocking that I figured I must have given students the wrong questions or that some other grave mistake must have been made. I double checked and decided that the results were legitimate. More than half of my students were reporting High or Severely High levels of anxiety. It meant that my students were somehow managing to scrape together some sort of existence despite emergency-room level anxiety. 

I didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t want to put together a slide show demonstrating just how fucked up their scores were in comparison to student scores from the past.

 

Table 1.2. Recent (2023) Distribution of Anxiety Scores 

 

Anxiety Level	Number of Students
Low	9
Moderate	4
High	12
Severely High	10

 

My first thought was, “Holy shit! They’re all fucked up!” I imagined that COVID-19 was to blame.  I called my friends who were practicing psychologists and explained what I had found. “Is there any reason to suspect that Gen Z mental health is in the shitter?” I asked.

            

None of my psychologist friends had an answer. They could only corroborate my results from their own practice: for some reason, Gen Zer self-esteem was in the toilet.

I couldn’t go back to teaching in good conscience. It would be like asking a group of kids to listen to a ten-minute lecture on the hypothalamus when those same kids were seated on the floor of a filled swimming pool. “Just relax,” I might say as they started urgently pointing at their mouths and throats, “the hypothalamus is tough to learn at first, but you’ll get it eventually.” 

Instead of teaching, I began conducting courses that could have doubled as group therapy sessions. Students were free to reveal their experiences of depression and anxiety if they so wished, which led to other students doing the same.

Answers finally came in the shape and size of a book titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt witnessed the same haunting changes in students that I had witnessed, but he had already been collecting data about child-rearing practices and their impacts on a variety of mental health conditions. In his book, Haidt tries to demonstrate how the change in child-rearing factors and the rise of smart-phone technology and usage created a perfect environment for a mental health epidemic.

Gen Z is Fucked, In Graphs

I can talk about and give stories demonstrate just how fucked Gen Z is, but you really just need see the graphs directly. The following come from US National statistics centers (CDC, Higher Education, and others) and have been organized by Haidt during his research. I’ll provide a short description of what each graph means. (All graphs are taken from Haidt's Chapter Notes.)

This graph shows that depression has gone up 135% (girls) and 161% (boys) over the last 14 years.

This graph shows that undergraduate males are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than they were 14 years ago.

Undergraduate females are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than they were 12 years ago.

Girls ages 10-14 are 4x more likely to self-harm today than they were 14 years ago. Boys are nearly 3x as likely.

Millennials (between red and orange) and Gen Xers (between orange and green) have had a slight increase in anxiety over the past 14 years (~50% increase). Younger Millennials (Red) and Gen Zers (Blue) have seen substantial increases in anxiety over the past 14 years. 161% for Zers and 111% for Millennials.

There are many more graphs showing similar graphs for hospitalizations due to self-harm, suicide rates, and other measures of shitty mental health. It’s all horribly bleak. But the graphs show that this is more than a generational malaise or funk. Haidt also shows that similar stats can be found in Canada, UK, and Australia, too, so Americans are not uniquely fucked. It’s all Gen Zers in the developed world.

Read on To Learn About Why Gen Z Was Set Up to Fail