Progressivism, Sexuality, and Mental Illness
by Eric Kaufmann, Quillette:
Is contemporary liberal-left culture producing greater mental distress?
Will America be entirely gay in a few generations? Will everyone be mentally ill? It would appear so from a straight-line extrapolation of the stunning rise in both LGBT identification and mental illness among young Americans.
Let’s begin with trends in sexual orientation among young people. A recent Gallup survey found that: “Roughly 21% of Generation Z Americans who have reached adulthood—those born between 1997 and 2003—identify as LGBT. That is nearly double the proportion of millennials who do so, while the gap widens even further when compared with older generations.” Abigail Shrier, meanwhile, reports a 1,000-fold increase in trans identification. Reactions to these trends have varied. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks they indicate that there will be no straight people in a few generations; Bill Maher lampoons the increase as a rebellious fad; and progressives celebrate the rise as an electoral boon for the Democrats. Other liberals view the rise as the product of increasing toleration, similar to left-handedness, in which identification increases as stigmas are lifted and people come out of the closet.
[…] So, between 2002 and 2012, seven percent of unhappy people under 30 were LGBT. However, by 2018–21, 22 percent of unhappy young people were LGBT—all during a period of rising toleration for sexual minorities. The well-known high incidence of mental illness among transgender youth is merely the most visible tip of a wider problem.
If the change over time is, like LGBT identification, largely a reporting difference, that’s one thing. But what if the data reflect a left-liberal culture that is producing greater mental distress? Or one which nudges people—especially the young—to identify as mentally ill, which focuses them on their emotional problems, leading to a negative psychological spiral? At the very least, one might have thought that researchers would have spent some time trying to test for anomic mental illness and its connection to left-modernist culture.
Yet, as Greenfeld notes, such research is essentially nonexistent. In addition to disciplinary constraints, this kind of endeavour is deeply unfashionable because it questions the taken-for-granted progressive narrative of discrimination, minority trauma, the fight for social justice, and the need for more resources for the psychotherapy industry. In the meantime, practitioners seem powerless to stem the tide of mental illness that now afflicts nearly half of young people and has been stubbornly rising across Western societies.
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