A Remarkable Reversal (Haidt's After Babel)
R. A. Friedman switched from dismissing concerns that the mental health of adolescents is deteriorating to raising a powerful alarm. What changed his opinion?
Within a short time, psychiatrist R. A. Friedman went from reassuring American parents that Our teenagers — and their brains — are up to the challenges of modern life to declaring a state of emergency because Teenagers and young adults in the United States are being ravaged by a mental health crisis:
This remarkable reversal occurred within the time separating Friedman’s September 2018 NY Times opinion The Big Myth About Teenage Anxiety from his yet another NY Times opinion Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? (January 2020).
Adolescent Suicide Rates
At the start of 2020, Friedman warns that an alarming number of young Americans are suffering from depression and dying by suicide.
This, however, was already true back in 2018 — in fact, 2017 is the peak year of the youth suicide rise for ages 15-19:
By the time Friedman was writing his 2018 NY Times opinion, the 2015 CDC suicide data was long available and already raising alarms. Similarly with the 2015 NSDUH depression data:
NSDUH MDE with Severe Impairment graph from Did Severe Depression Increase Among Teens?
Anxiety and Depression
Apologists could point out that the 2018 opinion was about anxiety while the 2020 alarm was about depression and suicide — but that is actually a meaningless distinction in this case.
First of all, as we saw in The Myth Gambit, Friedman’s rejection of concerns about anxiety trends was fatally flawed. The lack of surveys designed to detect clinically significant syndromes of the various anxiety disorders was no excuse to dismiss concerns over spikes in diagnosis of anxiety or in the prevalence of episodes of overwhelming anxiety.
More importantly, Friedman was reassuring parents that the mental health of their kids is not declining — even though the evidence was already showing that it is declining rapidly.
The fact that Friedman decided to inexplicably limit such concerns to clinical anxiety is not a mitigating factor. Friedman dismissed concerns over the mental health of adolescents a full year after the alarm raised by Jean Twenge in an article (Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?) where anxiety trends were not mentioned at all.
Even the article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis (Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?), which is the first link provided in Friedman’s 2018 NY Times opinion, directly appeals to trends in depression and suicidal conduct.
Tunnel Vision
It is apparent that, in 2018, Friedman was subject to tunnel vision: the failure to see the full context due to a focus on a single aspect of a larger issue. In essence, Friedman missed the forest around a stump that commanded his attention.
Friedman was deeply skeptical about the notion that smartphones and social media might be inflicting a heavy toll on the mental health of adolescents, and tried to assuage such fears by downplaying trends in anxiety as merely mild symptoms elevated to pathological levels by parents misled by media ‘panic’ over digital technology.
Friedman’s mistake was not (necessarily) his skepticism about the supposedly deleterious effects of the information epoch on U.S. youth — the mistake was his conclusion that the mental health of young people is not truly declining.
Once Friedman realized his error he did the honorable thing: he added his voice to those raising an alarm. Friedman did so even though he must have known that this will remind others of his 2018 opinion and may expose him to ridicule.
Haidt and Friedman
There are two lessons relevant to After Babel.
First is that even the brightest and most accomplished among us can be subject to tunnel vision, wishful thinking, and other forms of confirmation bias. Haidt and Twenge are no exceptions — and neither is any of their critics (myself included).
Second, various forms of confirmation bias, not to mention genuine misinterpretations of statistics, need not at all indicate deliberate bias. There is no reason to doubt that Friedman was always motivated by doing what is best for the mental health of young Americans.
We all should be willing and able to make a public reversal like R. A. Friedman did a few years ago.
Conclusion
Unlike Friedman’s September 2018 NY Times opinion that was blind to the clear signs that the mental health of young Americans is seriously deteriorating, his January 2020 NY Times opinion raises an alarm. Such a remarkable reversal deserves praise, not ridicule.
Notes
Prevention:
There are aspects of Friedman’s 2020 opinion that are beyond the scope of this commentary (and my expertise); for example, the assertion that we know how to prevent depression and suicide. If Friedman is correct and there truly are effective and practical means to substantially decrease the prevalence of depression and suicide among young Americans, we should be doing so and it is a national shame if we are not doing so.
I’ve written about this issue coincidentally at the very same time Friedman did — except that, rather than relying on my own non-existent expertise, I was reporting the views of clinical psychologists such as John P. Ackerman and Jeffrey Lieberman (see Prevention and the Youth Suicide Rise Project).
Confirmation Bias:
There is an unfortunate ambiguity about the word bias because it is often used to imply deliberate bias — and it is easy to deploy the term in scientific disputes to insinuate dishonesty if not outright fraud. It might therefore be best to limit the use of the word in criticism to bias in data or results.
The term confirmation bias, however, is a terminus technicus for which I see no valid replacement. Note that I’ve accused Haidt of confirmation bias before (see The Year 2012) and that this was not, of course, meant in any way to suggest Haidt was being dishonest.