From The Editors:
NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book “The Anxious Generation,” blaming cellphones and social media for the teen mental health crisis, is the no. 1 New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller and, when I checked, the no. 2 seller among all books at Amazon.
Yet there’s another, non-technology possible contributor to the mental health crisis that’s getting less attention but may be just as significant. That is the decline in church attendance. A professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Tyler VanderWeele, writes in Harvard Public Health: Extrapolations from the Nurses’ Health Study data suggest that about 40 percent of the increasing suicide rate in the United States from 1999 to 2014 might be attributed to declines in attendance at religious services during this period. Another study suggested declining attendance from 1991 to 2019 accounted for 28 percent of the increase in depression among adolescents.