In recent years since the beginning, one hears and reads that anxiety has particularly increased in young people, and there is a tendency to explain this phenomenon as an effect of isolation due to the pandemic, obsessive use of social media, and the educational inability of schools and families. Research data have highlighted this but I would like to point out that this increase nevertheless belongs to a trend of the increase of psychopathological phenomena in young people that has been growing since much earlier.
In fact, if in the 1970s and 1980s it was widely believed among psychologists to believe, on the basis of the research data of those years, that high-level athletes succeeded because they were psychologically mature, had stable personalities, and their growth had been carefully monitored [Botterill 1980], over time this view has turned out to be too simplistic. The reality turned out to be much more complex, since on the one hand current data would seem to confirm the thoughts made forty years ago that athletes tend to be, more extroverted and conscientious than non-athletes.
At the same time, distress phenomena such as anxiety and depression are psychological states also frequently experienced by athletes of all levels, and the publication of many autobiographies in which sports champions recount their black holes is clear evidence of the desire to want to exorcise through the narrative of their sports lives the fears and psychological distress experienced on their own skin.
On the other hand, analyzing the period 1938-2007 shows that at least in the United States among young people attending high school and college, psychopathological disorders have increased significantly, from six to eight times [Twenge et al. 2009]. Moreover, in a little more than 10 years, depression scores increased 52 percent among adolescents aged 12-17 years, from 8.7 percent to 13.2 percent, and 63 percent among young adults aged 18-25 years, from 8.1 percent to 13.2 percent [Twenge et al. 2019].
Such findings suggest that young people’s mental health has been adversely affected by changes in American culture, which has favored the emergence of extrinsic and egocentric goals such as money and status, while devaluing the development of the idea of community, affiliation and a sense of life. It is certainly likely that other factors are behind the dramatic increases in psychopathologies. However, these findings are consistent with the theorizing of those who argue that materialism, individualism, and impossibly high expectations have fostered the deterioration of mental health in the United States and other Western nations.
Today’s data confirm this deterioration in the mental health of young people by showing how a lack of interpersonal relationships, continued de-empowerment, living to meet immediate needs, and being undirected to pursue challenging goals increase psychological fragility and perceptions of being unable to cope with the tasks at hand.
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