Authorities are recasting young people’s concerns about climate change, Gaza, social justice, family crises, etc., as “mental illness”
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026
Let’s start with the clueless condescension, because it gets scarier.
National Public Radio’s 1A (First Amendment)’s lengthy 12/18 “Navigating modern adolescence” managed to dodge ALL the family, community, economic, and global issues teenagers tell major surveys are their biggest worries.
Instead, NPR depicted teen concerns as mere “rabbit holes” social media companies cook up to “monetize” the adolescent’s “brain and a body that are changing dramatically.” “Their stress is not about you,” NPR’s clinical psychologist soothed parents and grownups.
Of course, no one mentioned the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the big one everyone talks about but no one cites truthfully. Among teens who suffer depression, suicide attempts, gun carrying, fights, dating violence, etc., the biggest associates by far are parents’ and nearby adults’ psychological abuse (suffered by 62% of teens), violence (35%), “severe” mental health problems (35%), drug/alcohol abuse (30%), and criminal arrests (20%).
Nor did NPR’s experts and host mention the other big, definitive youth survey, Monitoring the Future, which shows poor relationships with parents, not social media use, are the biggest drivers of youthful unhappiness. Teenage girls concerned about climate change and social issues are unhappier than those who shrug them off, MTF’s latest survey finds.
Officials and big interests don’t like young activists; they prefer the shrug-offs. Just tell teens, “It’s not so bad,” NPR’s experts advised parents and clinicians.
Young people have no real problems… just social-media-created “phobias”
“Why ‘peniaphobia’ [fear of being poor] is exploding among young people (and why we should be concerned),” headlines The Independent, London’s liberal-left paper (except on youth issues).
Seven in 10 18-29-year-olds think their generation will not be better or as well off as their parents.
Sure, young people are being “brutally confronted with precariousness: student jobs lost, difficulties paying rent, and recourse to food banks” and “a feeling of economic vulnerability,” the article admits, alongside failing to refute young people’s well-founded fears of poverty. But those aren’t the real problem.
What’s the real problem? You guessed it – “social media platforms,” whose materialistic images “play a major role in spreading this anxiety. On Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the most popular content depicts idealized lives: dream vacations, luxury outfits, immaculate apartments, dazzling professional success… A lifestyle that seems out of reach for many, fueling feelings of failure or inferiority.”
Young people’s economic fears are really just an “insidious illness” driven by social media’s shallow “race for success… as if not being able to be first calls their entire life into question,” a child psychiatrist explains. “For some young people, this translates into a constant fear of ‘failing in life’ if they don’t quickly achieve a certain level of material comfort. The constant comparison, combined with fear of the economic future, makes peniaphobia a breeding ground for mental distress.”
“How can we allay (young people’s) fear of being downgraded?” the article asks. Not by leaders actually confronting wealth concentration, unaffordability, unemployment, housing and health costs, environmental degradation, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Perish the thought.
No; experts’ solution is for young people to disconnect from social media, do breathing exercises, and “seek professional help” for their “phobia” to “understand its origins and develop appropriate support.”
Socially conscious young people – especially liberal girls – are mentally ill
NPR’s and The Independent’s hosts and psychologists sound AI-programmed, like ordering, “Siri! Devise a sentence or two dismissing young people’s real concerns.”
However, they’re not the worst manifestation of growing mainstream-liberal pretend-sympathy campaigns that recast social-media “victimized” young people’s – especially young women’s – concerns over climate change, Gaza, social justice, and larger issues as psychoses treatable by counseling and online banishments.
U.S. psychologist Jean Twenge declares Gen Z liberal girls’ social-justice and climate-change concerns are frivolous; psychologist Jonathan Haidt ignores them altogether. Girls are depressed because they’re duped by social media’s shallow looks-and-popularity images and bullying by “mean” teenagers, Twenge says. Haidt insists liberal girls just need to get off social media and perhaps get psychological treatment. Teens only use social media for porn, cyberbullying, spreading bad values, and contact with predators, Haidt and Twenge say.
Both rely on their own prejudices against young people instead of evidence; they both ignore Pew Research, CDC, and other major surveys showing large majorities of teens use social media beneficially and encounter much more meanness from adults at home than online. No matter. Emotional calls to ban teens from social media are quotable and popular.
Right-wingers rejoice in these inchoate attacks on young people, but Democrats are leading the reprogram-youth crusade. Online analyst Taylor Lorenz condemns “dumb, dumb, dumb” progressives and liberals who lead the charge to internet-ban and age-restrict Gen Z teens, potentially crippling their global advocacy for progressive causes.
And it gets still worse
This banish/redirect-youth crusade gets scarier still, as if the bottom has fallen out of human beings’ long, painful struggle toward decency. You can plumb the darkest pits of the savage “manosphere” cave and not find anything approaching the evil expressed by the Obama presidency’s Hillary Clinton and Sarah Hurwitz and roomfuls of applauding billionaire-funded luminaries.
Hurwitz, Clinton and their top-level audiences are deeply upset… not at the “carnage” and “wall of dead children” in Gaza, their own words describing the mass-slaughter by Israeli forces armed by US, UK, and German governments.
No, Clinton and Hurwitz declare with shocking candor (they never thought their words would become public) to approving corporate, political, religious, media, and foundation elites, the villains are social media platforms like TikTok that are “smashing our young people’s brains” by showing real on-the-ground reporting, graphic videos, and embarrassingly direct quotes from the Israeli press and leaders’ openly genocidal statements on Gaza.
Clinton and Hurwitz yearned for a past when “responsible” Western media censored harsh realities from public view. The “constant exposure to graphic images from Gaza social media feeds filled with footage of dead and injured Palestinian children are creating an emotional shock that ‘makes it impossible’ for her to defend Israel’s actions in conversations with young people,” Hurwitz complained.* Jewish schools should ban smartphones and social media until senior year, she said, to — you guessed it — “protect students’ mental health.”
Hurwitz is outraged that young people, especially Jewish students, are “confusing… essential Holocaust education” with the logical ethical principle that “big powerful people hurting weaker people,” as Nazis did to Jews, is wrong, an inhumane atrocity.
No, no, no, Hurwitz insists, the overly-egalitarian claim that the Holocaust lesson is “never again” for all peoples is “anti-Semitic.” Rather, Jewish and other young people must be taught that “big strong Israelis… hurting emaciated Palestinians” (her words) is morally right.
An eye-blink ago,1980s and ‘90s authorities worried that violent movies, rap, and video games were de-sensitizing children and teens to violence and molding a generation of “adolescent super-predators.” All baloney, as it turned out, but now, authorities complain that real images of harsh brutalities from Palestine are over-sensitizing young people’s humanitarian empathies, interfering with official carnages.
More nihilist than the darkest “manosphere” pit
If Western culture retains a shred of the civilized decency we boast about, the likes of Hurwitz, Clinton, and like-minded elites would be ostracized from public discourse. Instead, the reverse is happening: more dictatorial censorship edicts across the West to suppress all dissent – especially by young people, and especially concerning Gaza, climate change, and social justice.
Congressmembers freely declare they forced the sale of TikTok to a pro-Israel mega-billionaire not for “national security” or other made-up subterfuges, but to suppress young people’s pro-Palestine views. The UK and German governments allied with Big Tech (which delightedly exploits government “age verification” mandates to gather users’ private information) likewise are decimating free speech principles to shut down advocacies officials broadly label as “anti-Semitic” and “terrorism.”
The 1984 metaphor is overworked, but still… it’s hard to imagine worse Orwellisms than Clinton’s denunciation of real-death videos from Palestine as “made up” because they challenge official narratives, or the coalescing of government, Big Tech, anti-youth, psychological, and established media interests around sweeping dictates to bar young people and dissidents from vital online resources in the name of preventing “mental illness.” We’re living a dystopian cliche.
*I’d love to see Hillary and Hurwitz debate political scientist Norm Finkelstein, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, or campus activist Simone Zimmerman on the “facts” of Israel-Palestine. Never going to happen. The elites hide in safe, billionaire-sponsored forums and controlled media like Fox News and Morning Joe.