How Feminism Accidentally Created A Mental Health Crisis | The Deep

Feminism promised women freedom and happiness. But today, 66% of Gen Z women describe their mental health as poor or terrible, and the majority of teen girls are in therapy. What went wrong? 1960s feminism had one central complaint. Being a woman sucked. Betty Friedan lamented our comfortable concentration camps. Janis Joplin gave us women is losers. And the red-stocking revolutionaries' manifesto, Feminist Revolution, raged against all past ideology, literature, and philosophy, products as they are, of male supremacist culture. They even suggested women needed to develop a new language to describe female victimization.

Well, we're still speaking English and watching Jane Austen adaptations. And we're still repeating the feminist mantra, It's impossible to be a woman. That feeling was re-upped recently by Gloria in Greta Gerwig's Barbie. On the surface, the legacy of feminism is Barbie World, the world of girl power. Women dominate higher ed, lower ed, political parties, law, and medicine. But when we, like Barbie herself, leave Barbie World and enter the real world, we find post-apocalyptic hellscapes. Shocking rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among the very women and teens most receptive to that feminist foremother's mantra.

It is literally impossible to be a woman. It is literally impossible to be a woman. That's the infamous line from America Ferreira's Gloria. At a key moment in the film, she sits Barbie down for a little real-world therapy session. Gloria informs a tearful, awakening Barbie that the system is rigged against all uterus havers. I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself in a knot. into knots so that people will like us. Gloria personifies a sinister, profoundly seductive therapy culture masquerading as consciousness-raising.

And Gloria's message? The system is rigged. America Ferreira later told the New York Times, We can know things and still need to hear them out loud. It can still be cathartic. There are a lot of people who need Feminism 101, whole generations of girls who are just coming up And who don't have the words for the culture they're being raised in? America's analysis of the culture we're raising our girls in, the system is rigged. I'm not here to diminish the difficulties facing young girls, but I am here to say that Feminism 101 misses the boat.

And the consequences for young girls, especially liberal young girls, are demonstrably deadly. They're not being raised in a man's world. They're being raised in a therapy culture that rehearses wrongs and licks wounds. Our girls are being trained in the mental habits of depressed, anxious people.

Misery loves company, and among America's Gen Z, Gloria's misery has plenty of company, and it is past time for us to save the girls from Barbie's world, and here's how. Now, when I say the girls are sad, how sad are we talking?

Fewer than half of Gen Zers describe their mental health as good. 39% of Gen Z Americans report going to therapy weekly, with 42% of them receiving a psychiatric disorder diagnosis. But it turns out that the mental health crisis is gendered. While 56% of Gen Z men describe their mental health as good, only 34% of women do. And when you drill down, it's not all women.

More specifically, liberal young women are dragging down the mental health profile of an entire generation. This is not just a vibes-based claim. The data are remarkably consistent across studies and surveys. Depression, anxiety, identity confusion, and therapeutic intervention all rise faster and higher among liberal Gen Z women than any other demographic group. One of the most important studies was a 2022 report titled The Politics of Depression. Using the Monitoring the Future dataset, the only major U.S. survey that asks high school seniors to self-identify as liberal or conservative, researchers tracked depressive symptoms going back decades.

Before 2012, there were no significant sex differences. Liberal and conservative teens looked roughly the same. But then, something changed. Starting around 2012, depression among liberal girls spiked sharply, rising faster and higher than liberal boys, conservative boys, or conservative girls. Since 2010, liberal girls rose 0.73 points on a 5-point depression scale, where the standard deviation is just 0.89. That's not noise. That is a structural shift. So, what happened? The authors of the original study argued that liberal girls suffered because they were alienated in a growing conservative political climate.

In other words, the man's world of the 1960s had turned into the Handmaid's Tale-level oppression, a claim that seems implausible given what America actually looked like after 2012. There's another layer to this story. One that helps explain how these patterns moved from therapy offices and into politics, classrooms, and culture. In 2014, Jonathan Haidt accepted an invitation to lunch with Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, who shared with him a chilling observation. While Greg had spent his career pushing back on college administrators who were suppressing free speech, in 2013, he began to find That it was now the students themselves pushing to ban speakers, censor unsafe ideas, or drive policy changes that would silence dissent.

Greg, who had suffered from depression himself, also observed that in cognitive behavioral therapy, patients are taught to identify common cognitive distortions, faulty thinking patterns that both cause and worsen depression, patterns like catastrophizing. Black and white thinking, fortune-telling, emotional reasoning. CBT teaches people to notice these patterns, challenge them, and replace them with more accurate ways of thinking. But Gregg observed, and Haight agreed, that the students involved in protests, censorship campaigns, and ideological purity tests were using the very same distorted thought patterns, not as problems to correct, but as moral justifications.

Catastrophe became proof of oppression. Black and white thinking became virtue. Emotional reasoning replaced evidence. Instead of learning, my thoughts may be lying to me, students were being taught, my emotional reaction proves the system is unjust. It's what Matt Iglesias calls the Taylor-Lorenz explanation, that the world is so broken, unjust, and frightening that Gen Z can't help but be depressed. Iglesias flips that logic. It's not reality making you depressed. Rather, depression makes reality look terrible, and once entrenched, it becomes a feedback loop.

Catastrophizing leads to feelings of helplessness. Helplessness leads to rage or despair. Rage gets externalized. Who did this to me? Despair turns inward. What's the point? This is why the popular therapeutic language of Naming feelings and validating emotions, while sometimes helpful, can also become dangerous when severed from agency. If your internal narrative constantly tells you that your suffering proves the system is rigged, your nervous system never stands down. And once that framework is culturally reinforced by movies, social media, and political rhetoric, it stops you from doing what you want to do.

...being a private mental health issue and becomes a shared worldview. Which brings us to an uncomfortable conclusion. For a growing number of young women, depression isn't just something they have. It's the lens through which they have been taught to see the world. But who's teaching them? It turns out, largely their online communities.

According to Pew Research data, in 2009, the year that Greg's Pro-censorship students would have been in 8th or 9th grade. Most teenagers who had any phone owned a traditional mobile phone, while only an estimated 5 to 10% had a smartphone. In just two years, that number more than doubled to 23%. And by 2013, 37% of American teens carried a smartphone around. Right around the time Greg started to notice the rise in student Zhao's age. Depressive-like behavior. Today, 98% of older teens report daily access to smartphones.

But smartphones in themselves are just tools, right? Sure, but they seem to be tools that adolescent girls find particularly impossible to live without, and the results for mental health have been disastrous. In what might be a ray of hope, The teens themselves seem to be aware that something is deeply sick in social media culture. In one study out of Australia, adolescents overwhelmingly blame social media for their worsening mental health. Large-scale studies bear out a significant correlation between unhappiness and new media use, including social media and smartphones.

In one study by Gene Twang and W. Keith Campbell, With an N of nearly a quarter million adolescents, teens using digital media less than one hour daily reported, quote, substantially higher psychological well-being than those who were on their screens five or more hours daily. Shockingly, those heavy users were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, Suicidal ideation or past suicide attempts. And who is online the most?

Girls. A 2023 Gallup poll found that girls report spending an average of 5.3 hours daily on social media, compared with 4.4 hours for boys. And those extra hours matter. A lot. Here's some personal testimony from girls who are online and have, shall we say, robust social media lives. Because this, this, and this, no one sees the good clips. Right, because those aren't what go viral. Yeah, I know. What gets clipped is you acting crazy, because that's what gets viewed. Yeah, but it makes you look some type of way.

Right. So, I would say the Brooklyn hate train definitely started that, like the feeling. This sounds to me like everything Gloria was describing to Barbie. In the last 60 years, women haven't built on the feminist revolution. We've doubled down on lines like, quote, We regard our feelings as our most important source of political understanding, and handed our daughters and granddaughters smartphones so they can ruminate on their pain without pause. Once an entire generation is encouraged to interpret discomfort, disagreement, or failure as trauma inflicted by external forces, resilience never has a chance to form.

Therapy language, stripped of its purpose, and weaponized by ideology, stops healing people and starts training them in fragility. And no one is more fragile, it seems, than the liberal girls. 56.3% of Gen Z white liberal women have been told by a healthcare provider that they have a mental health condition. So what can we do? If we actually want to help teenage girls, especially liberal hyper online girls, break out of the anxiety and mental health spiral we keep talking about, we have to start with something surprisingly basic, agency.

Psychologists call this locus of control. It's the difference between believing I can act and shape my life, and believing life happens to me. And right now, we are actively training young girls into the second category. They're told their emotions are fragile, their environment is dangerous, their outcomes are determined by systems they didn't choose and can't control. Girls raised almost entirely inside educational institutions, pop culture, and screens. Here are the same ideological victim narratives over and over. They are conditioned to see themselves primarily as patients.

Anxiety increases, passivity follows, and spirals deepen. The message is subtle but relentless. You are acted upon, and the only way out is to dominate men. See my video on the great feminization. In contrast, girls who believe they have control over their choices, who are taught to act, To solve problems, to build competence, are more resilient and less depressed. So, the solution isn't more labels, more diagnoses, more therapeutic language. It's rebuilding an internal locus of control.

And that doesn't happen primarily in lecture halls or on TikTok. It happens offline. Parents cannot just outsource formation to schools and screens anymore. So, encourage girls to get outside, get off the phones. Get a job, date, fail, rise, and try again. Online life should not be more exciting than their real life. So much for secular wisdom, all of which is a necessary first step to saving the girls. But it's not enough. We need not just secular psychological solutions, but a spiritual renewal.

If Gloria represents the catechism our culture gives to girls now, the system is rigged, you are trapped. Then history gives us a radically different option. Thomas More. He's best known for writing Utopia, serving as Lord Chancellor, and eventually losing his head to Henry VIII, but he is less remembered for one of his most radical and consequential decisions, how he educated his children. In an age when even elite girls were trained almost exclusively for marriage and court politics, Moore did something extraordinary.

He gave his daughters the same education as his son. He expected his daughters to be clear-eyed about the times in which they lived, and they weren't great, but to understand as well that no system or court could deprive them of their interior beauty or freedom or worth. He believed education was not about grievance, but about freedom, the freedom to choose well, to govern oneself. And to endure loss without despair.

Moore's eldest, Margaret Moore Roper, became a respected scholar. She corresponded with Europe's leading intellectuals, translated Erasmus as a teenager, and was treated as a serious mind in a world that rarely treated women that way. Contrast this with the powerful women of the Tudor court, women who gained influence through spectacle, manipulation, or sexual politics.

Running down the list of Henry VIII's wives, that path ended badly for nearly everyone involved. Freedom resides in the soul, and nothing can deprive you of interior freedom gained by a clear conscience. Thomas More died for that conviction. Margaret More didn't have a smartphone on hand, and no Instagram accounts have survived that I know of, but it's hard to imagine her posting a selfie screaming, we shall overcome, live from Anne Boleyn's execution.

Margaret lost her father, her inheritance, and her social standing. If anyone could cry victim, it was a Catholic woman in Tudor England. Yet, from the documents we have, we know she remained faithful to his memory, to her faith, and to the formation he had given her. She would go on to educate her own children, including her daughters, who stayed faithful to the church during one of the most volatile moments in English history.

So, here's the question this episode has been circling the whole time. What kind of women are we forming? Gloria gave Barbie one option. Girls trained from childhood to believe that the system is rigged, that her emotions are evidence, and that her suffering is the center of the story. Thomas More gives us another. Women trained to endure, to rise above, and to raise up those around them with grace. One represents a culture of spectacle, therapy speak, and permanent dissatisfaction, even when dressed up as empowerment.

The other represents formation, discipline, and freedom grounded in the truth. Here's the hard part. It means swimming against the tide. It means limiting social media when everyone else is handing out smartphones. It means pushing competence over comfort. It means offering your daughters counter-narratives, not because the world is fair, but because they can face it. Every generation catechizes its children, whether it admits it or not. And right now, too many voices are still catechizing girls into fragility, grievance, and despair, even when many of the purported goals of the feminist movement have on paper been achieved.

We can choose differently with personal, intentional formation, a formation that demands more from a girl's teachers. Parents, and from the girl herself. And if we can do that, then the saddest generation doesn't have to stay that way. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to LOOPcast on YouTube. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.