What If The Youth Crisis of Mental Health and Attention Never Actually Happened?

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What If The Youth Crisis of Mental Health and Attention Never Actually Happened?<br>Two new studies cast doubt on a public narrative

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.<br>Jun 15, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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Back in the 2000s, society was awash in the idea that youth were overcome by a “narcissism epidemic”. Supposedly, coddled by trophies for just showing up, and too much self-esteem, kids were full of themselves more than they ever had been. Ultimately, the whole idea proved difficult to replicate. As one study concluded, “Our study suggests that today’s college students are less narcissistic than their predecessors and that there may never have been an epidemic of narcissism.” Indeed, 20 years on, the whole “narcissism epidemic” appears to have been quietly memory-holed. When was the last time you heard anything about it? There was no reckoning, no acknowledgement that some social scientists and the public narrative had gotten it wrong. And the cycle simply shifts to the next panic.

Which brings me to the current narrative. You don’t have to go long without seeing someone clutching pearls over a “generation in crisis” over their mental health, or some grouchy college professor complaining college kids today can’t read. In a very Dothraki sense it is known that the youth of today have more anxieties, worse attention, hell can’t order from a menu (here’s Freya India suggesting 80% of GenZ have anxiety ordering from a restaurant menu1). But…what if, like the narcissism epidemic,…none of this ever happened2.<br>Share<br>Most of our beliefs about a mental health crisis come from self-report data. But such data is notoriously unreliable. Diagnostic criteria change, language changes, stigma changes, incentives changes…tracking self-report over time can introduce a ton of error. As Michael Sheeringa has pointed out, false positives in self-report data of mental health are very common, particularly with the dodgy, non-clinical surveys used in most studies. By contrast, cross-national suicide data have never pointed to there being any “epidemic” of, at least, serious mental health crises among teens. Teen suicide did increase in the US during the 2010s, but middle-aged adult suicides went up even higher at the same time. Looking at teen suicides in isolation and blaming phones rather than acknowledging it as an intergenerational issue primarily targeting middle-aged adults was one of the greatest missed opportunities of mental health policy in the 2010s. Fortunately, even in the US, youth suicides have been going down the last few years, accompanied by reductions in self-reported serious mental health symptoms according to CDC data. So even in the US, the “crisis” such as it was, appears to have reversed.

Cross-national European suicide data for youth shows no trend. Technically, across Europe, youth suicides went down slightly during the smartphone/social media era, though there is lots of cross-country heterogeneity.<br>But was this “crisis” isolated in the US, or was it a cross-national generational crisis? Two new studies suggest that perhaps, after all, there hasn’t been any “crisis” of youth mental health nor any indication that, contrary to every teacher and college professor’s griping, that attention has become more impaired in recent generations.<br>The first study by Vekety and colleagues, now in press at Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review used studies of the standardized Child Behavior Checklist over time, rather than self-report to examine rates of youth mental health problems. The second study by Andrzejewski and colleagues examined scores on a standardized test of attention and cognition over time. Both avoid the pitfalls of clumsy self-report. Both reach the same conclusion: Youth today are doing about as well as ever. There is no crisis of youth mental health or cognition. Let’s have a quick look at the two studies.

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