Participants in a historic international symposium at Dartmouth on the unprecedented, worldwide collapse of mental health and well-being among young people were left with a hopeful message—and a call to action.
“These kinds of collective action problems, in which everybody wants the same thing, but we are acting in a way that goes against what we all want, are actually not social dilemma problems,” Pedro Conceição, director of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office, said in an address on Oct. 28.
“These are coordination problems. And coordination problems are much easier to solve and address, because we all want the same thing. So I think there is hope here.”
The Oct. 26-28 symposium, A Global Turning Point: Why Youth Well-Being Is in Crisis—and What We Must Do About It, was co-hosted by Dartmouth and the UNDP.
The event brought together leading experts on mental health, economics, policy, and medicine, including a return to campus of six former U.S. surgeons general, who in an Oct. 27 panel cited social media as a root of the problem.
Symposium participants included pediatricians, psychologists, sociologists, historians, economists, policymakers, and students. They hailed from every part of the world, including Bangladesh, Brazil, the European Union, India, Iraq, Jordan, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, all drawn to Dartmouth to explore the implications of a sharp decline in the reported well-being of young people.
Attendees were asked to comment on a draft of the Dartmouth-UN Principles, a document that organizers hope will help rally the world to urgent action.
“We are really deeply honored to bring the best minds in the world on issues around young people’s mental health together for this historic symposium,” said President Sian Leah Beilock, who since taking office in 2023 has made the promotion of mental health a top priority for Dartmouth.
Introducing the surgeons general panel, President Beilock—a renowned cognitive scientist who studies the psychology of performance—described how Dartmouth’s efforts have been paying off. These efforts include the Commitment to Care strategic plan for student mental health and well-being, the appointment of Dartmouth’s first chief health and wellness officer and first senior vice president for community and campus life, and the recent launch of Evergreen, a first-of-its-kind evidence-based AI chatbot that provides students personalized guidance and support, among other initiatives.
“Recently we surveyed our student body, looking at changes from 2021 to 2024, and we saw that risk for moderate to severe depression dropped from 33% to 24% in those three years,” Beilock said. “Perhaps most encouraging of all, the number of students who agree that Dartmouth prioritizes mental health has risen dramatically, from 44% in 2021 to 73% in 2024. We still have significant work ahead, but we also have hope—and evidence—that we can identify the interventions that truly make a difference.”
Speaking remotely to an audience in Spaulding Auditorium and over livestream, Jonathan Haidt—a professor of social psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business—ascribed much of the decline in youth mental well-being to the advent of smartphones, which became ubiquitous in the Western world in the early 2010s—precisely when the drop in well-being starts to appear in the data.
“I can summarize my whole book by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have underprotected them online,” said Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that unregulated phone and social media exposure is causing children today to miss crucial developmental opportunities kids used to get through unstructured play and in-person social interaction.
Haidt outlined several policy solutions to reverse the trend, including effective age verification and age limits on devices and social media platforms, smartphone bans in schools, and safer online spaces for kids. “We have enabled the greatest mass destruction of human potential when we put our kids on devices instead of on life. The solution is collective action.”
In a speech Monday morning at the Hanover Inn, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic, presented evidence pointing to smartphones as a major driver of the mental health crisis among Gen Z, the first generation to reach adolescence in the age of social media.
“It really comes down to this: Other than smartphones, social media, and the changes in those technologies, nothing else had such a big impact on that age group so universally,” Twenge said. “Those changes in how they spent their time—it’s not something they read about or that happened to their parents. It is something that had an impact on them every single day for hours at a time. Think about it this way: Spending more time on screens, less time with friends in person, less time sleeping—that is a pretty terrible formula for mental health.”
Economist David Blanchflower, the Bruce V. Rauner 1978 Professor at Dartmouth, who helped organize the symposium, credited a 2023 interview with Twenge with helping him spot the negative shift in teen well-being. Prior to this, Blanchflower had spent much of his career studying the famous U-shaped pattern in human happiness, which for decades showed well-being at its peak among the young and at its lowest in midlife. As he told symposium participants, he considered this to be “among the most striking, persistent, and consistent patterns in social science. What idiot wrote that? OK, it was me. … Because it was, until it wasn’t.”
Indeed, Blanchflower has now shown that the characteristic shape of the pattern has disappeared, driven by the reported unhappiness of young people beginning around 2012. Commissioned by the UNDP, he has authored or co-authored more than a dozen papers studying this shift among young people throughout the world.
Of particular concern for Blanchflower as an economist is the impact on the labor market and the potential long-term implications. “The big rise in the ill-being of the young who are 23 and 24 and 25 is driven by a huge rise in the ill-being of young workers” despite a concurrent rise in wages, he said. “This is not something that we’ve seen before.”
Political scientist Robert Putnam, a professor emeritus at the Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of Making Democracy Work, Bowling Alone, and, most recently, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, pointed out that the United States has come through similar eras of youth disengagement, income inequality, and political polarization, notably the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That period inspired a progressive movement that led to the development of everything from labor unions to 4-H and scouting to the invention of the playground and even the sport of basketball. By the 1960s, the negative trends had completely reversed.
“The most important thing I want to say, especially to young people, some of whom are in the room: You didn’t cause the problem, we caused this problem,” Putnam said. “But it’s fallen to you to fix it, and you have agency. You can fix it. Because in the first decades of the 20th century, people just like you did fix it then. So I’m not just saying, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your act together; I’m saying all you have to do is do what they did.”
The symposium began on Sunday, Oct. 26, by showcasing Dartmouth-grown initiatives to support student mental health and wellness, including an emphasis on outdoor experiences.
“The idea was to give people an opportunity to get outside and get some exercise; to connect in a new way and to meet peers and colleagues, which we did. It was also a chance to show off the Upper Valley to visitors,” said Bruce Sacerdote ’90, the Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor of Economics, who helped organize the activities and led a group hike up Holt’s Ledge in Lyme, N.H.
Ariana Stephens, MED ’28, called the opportunity to participate in a student roundtable and watch the larger panel discussion with the former surgeons general “a distinct privilege.”
“Throughout both, they stressed the importance of listening and intentionally addressing mental health interpersonally because of both its realistic application and effectiveness in creating lifesaving conversations within our communities,” said Stephens.
“The surgeons general emphasized their desire to share the wisdom they have gleaned over the years with new generations in hopes that we are able to take the mantle and become the next leaders for the crisis in youth mental health.”
Sofia Uribe ’29, from Long Beach, Calif., was struck by the international nature of the symposium.
“I’m here at Dartmouth for a worldly education,” Uribe said. “It’s a privilege to be able to hear people at the top of their field talk about things that are so relevant. I have an interest in sociology—I mean, we’re all participating members of the human race, and it’s only natural to want to learn more about our global humanity. Especially right now, when we live in such fear—political fear, economic fear, environmental fear around climate change. I think it’s necessary to put yourself in a position where you can get educated on the issues. That way you know how to address them.”
Sherlin Perez Gonzales, a biology major and member of the Class of 2027 at Bates College, said she was excited to hear from the surgeons general and especially to learn about proactive ways to reduce stigma around mental health. She was one of several Bates students in attendance.
“There are so many different disciplines that have come together to tackle this crisis,” Perez Gonzalez said. “The different talks have given us more insight on what we can implement ourselves on our own campus. Dartmouth has a really good mental health first aid program, and that’s something that a lot of us have been trying to implement at our college. Dartmouth is a huge pioneer for doing all this, and it shows that they really care about the well-being of students.”
Along with the national and international experts, faculty, and staff from the departments of computer science, economics, German studies, history, and psychological and brain studies, as well as from the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth Health, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the Outdoor Programs Office, and the Wilderness Medicine Program & Alliance for Climate Health participated in panels at the symposium.
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