Is anxiety increasing?
Are some people especially vulnerable?
Most of the buzz about generational differences has been around the purported higher levels of narcissism and self-esteem of younger people (well summed up by Jean Twenge’s book Generation Me). There has been less attention on Twenge’s research indicating that contemporary cohorts of young people are more anxious.
Not just a bit more anxious – we’re talking a shift such that the average university student in the US taking a standard test of ‘trait anxiety’ in the 90s was more anxious than 85% of students in the 50s. American school children in the 80s who were in the ‘average’ range on tests of anxiety, relative to their peers, reported anxiety levels similar to that of child psychiatric patients in the 50s.
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Robert Booth led an international study across 57 countries covering the 40 years 1970 to 2010. Booth’s team showed a global increase of around 7% on anxiety measured for 205,451 people on the STAI (state trait anxiety inventory).
This increase in anxiety seems to be driven by the increase in the level of student anxiety. No increases over this period were found for non-students in the US. In Australia (considering overall results and not splitting out groups such as students) – there was no significant change over the same time (and there were no results for New Zealand).
This suggests an intersection between environmental pressures (academic pressure, job market competition and no doubt other factors) and individual predisposition that has made US students (and potentially other students squeezed by the same factors) more vulnerable to having their lives disrupted by anxiety.
This raises an important issue of how to interpret reports of high anxiety levels. Is it necessary to shift the level of what is significant to wellbeing up the scale? Does our increased openness to people discussing mental health issues mean that some of the anxiety we see today would have been hidden previously? If so the urgent need is to ensure that there is practical help for people at risk of being disabled by these disturbing emotions.