It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as Jean Twenge and I have shown.

In our 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and I presented evidence that the same trends were happening in Canada and the United Kingdom—not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” It seemed that all the Anglo nations were setting up their children for failure in the same ways at the same time.

In 2019 I went on a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand (thanks to Think Inc) and discovered that the same trends were coming, more slowly, to the Southern hemisphere Anglo nations too. I then created two new collaborative review documents, one for Australia, and one for New Zealand, to gather all the empirical studies and journalistic accounts I could find.

In early 2020, just as COVID swept in, I hired Zach Rausch as a research assistant to help me handle these collaborative review docs. I connected with Zach, who was finishing his master’s degree in Psychological Science at SUNY New Paltz, after reading his blog post about his research related to The Coddling. Zach and I created many more collaborative review docs for many more countries and topics, which you can find (and add to) on this page.

In 2021, as I was beginning to work on the Babel project, I told Zach that it was urgent that we figure out just how international the mental illness epidemic was. Is it just happening in the five countries of what is sometimes called The Anglosphere? Is it all Western countries? Is it happening everywhere? Go figure it out and report back to me.

The rest of this post is Part 1 of Zach’s report, in his voice. I think his findings are momentous and should cause an immediate global rethinking of what children need to have a healthy childhood, and what obstacles to development arrived around the globe around 2012.

Today we have Zach’s second post on how teen mental health is changing around the world. In his last post, Zach showed that there is a four-part pattern in the data from all five of the main “Anglosphere” countries. Today he presents the studies he has collected on teen mental health in the five Nordic nations (the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, plus Finland and Iceland).

The Nordic nations differ in many ways from the Anglosphere countries. In particular, they have lower levels of some of the social pathologies that some have said might explain the rising levels of mental illness in the USA such as income inequality, a hyper-competitive neoliberal economy, school shootings, and other gun violence. The Nordic countries also seem to do a lot less of the “coddling” and paranoid overprotection that is rampant in the USA, Canada, and the UK (though not so common down under).

And yet, as you’ll see, the basic pattern largely holds. I think these two posts from Zach are tremendously important for they show us that the teen mental illness epidemic is international. We need to be looking for causes that can explain the international pattern, even as we know there are also additional causes and cultural interactions specific to each country.