Trauma & Dissociation discussion

May 2025 Book of the Month:

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (2024)


Publisher’s Summary
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A Washington Post Notable Book • A New York Times Notable Book • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

My daughter is facing tremendous anxiety, and it does seem to plague her entire generation. This isn’t “trauma” and … what kids do with social media … while it does seem disingenuous or two-faced, projecting a persona or image online that isn’t consistent with how they are in person … I wouldn’t call any of that “dissociation”. But, it’s a behavioral health issue for her generation. And, since no one else participated to either nominate or vote for a proper trauma or dissociation book, … this is what you get … this month.

My generation was the latch key generation, utterly neglected by parents as we were the first generation where it became normal, not the exception, for mother’s to work 30-40 hours a week. We came home to empty houses. Mothers came home … at least mine did … relatively tired, relatively ornery, … like dads always did (at least mine) … and self-absorbed with the non-kids part of their life. It showed up in the griping grunge and Nu Metal music of my generation. So, if X has their generational issues, why can’t Y, or Z generations?

Question: Do you think it’s valid to say that generation Z has more anxiety and/or are afflicted adversely by social media?

Question: Do you think it’s valid to say that generation Z has underdeveloped interpersonal social skills due to interacting more online than in person?

Question: Do you think it’s valid to say that generation Z is handicapped in some ways … at least those who isolated or stayed at home and did remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, during their most formative years ?

I’m not trying to provoke any sort of political unrest here. Not questioning the appropriateness of policies. I’m just worried about helping my own kids to thrive. I didn’t get drafted to war like my dad. I didn’t stay home during a couple years of high school like my kids. I can only “imagine” what it’s like for them since I didn’t experience life the same way.

He makes the case pretty quick that anxiety and depression dramatically increased for adolescents (10-20 years old) around 2012-2013, right when smart phones had penetrated to the majority.

He goes through studies of randomized controlled trials to prove that reduction of social media reduces depression in young women, and is a cause … where proceeding as normal does not reduce it. It is a cause of depression, not just a correlation. The effect is less in young men. It is only beyond 2 hours of social media per day that men begin to increase in depression.

OK … too much social media, not enough being traditionally social … as in physically present … is a problem. Not a hard sell.

But, saying “just stop” using your phone doesn’t seem realistic. So what is a practical way to find the balance?

And, it is hard for one kid to “fix” there problem when all their friends are also addicted to social media and averse to much physically getting together.

What is the practical solution? This is like telling a fat guy to simply stop eating … to not be fat. That doesn’t quite work. Well … maybe it does from some girls, but then you have an anorexic and that’s no good. They know they should … adjust in a certain direction. But, how do they successfully negotiate that turn in life? That’s the trick.

Still grinding on this one. A trauma book a month is pretty damn challenging, I must say. I don’t expect anyone else to keep up, but I am making a good college try to read them all. This one is not “trauma” per se, so much as depression and anxiety, but … the social media addiction is a slippery slope and can result in coming off the rails.

Finished it. I think it was worthwhile, especially for parents. He did have good ideas at the end.