Teens in Israel, US are in crisis – why is this happening?

Why are teenagers rebellious and often rowdy? There is a physiological explanation. 

After puberty and during teenage years, hormones explode. But the ability to rein them in and control them is deficient because the part of the brain in charge of impulse control, the prefrontal cortex, is not yet fully developed. 

And there is also psychology at work. From birth, children are powerfully attached to their mothers especially, and to their fathers. 

For teenagers, the process of separation begins. Teens seek independence as they mature into adults. The transition from attachment to separation is often fraught and chaotic. Teens rebel. Parents cling. 

I was a teen 67 years ago. Yet to this day, in retrospect I vividly remember behaving with disrespect and downright stupidity. 

Toss into this mix the social isolation brought by COVID and the disastrous impact on teens of social media, and you have a teenage mental health crisis in Israel, the US, and many other countries.

The teen crisis in Israel

A new study by Liat Shahaf, Therapeutic Intervention: How to Save the Public Psychology System in Israel, reveals that two-thirds of junior high school students, and 60% of elementary school students, suffer from mild to severe depression symptoms. 

An older study by the National Council for the Child, 2018, showed that the number of suicide attempts by children aged 14 and under rose by 62 percent within a decade.

In the latest issue of Psychoactualia, the journal of the Israel Psychological Association (full disclosure: My wife, Dr. Sharona Maital, is the editor), Dr. Debbie Cohen, coordinator of the National Suicide Prevention Program, Jerusalem, and colleagues from the Israel Health Ministry, noted in an article that the number of children 14 years of age and younger who committed suicide in 2012-2016 was double the number for the period 2002-2006. 

Is anything being done to address the crisis?

The Knesset Health Committee, led by MK Uriel Busso (Shas), held a meeting on February 21 as part of a special day in the Knesset dedicated to the prevention of suicides. Naturally, TV and print media focused attention solely on the incendiary Knesset Justice Committee led by firebrand Simcha Rothman and utterly ignored the teen crisis.

At the Health Committee meeting, Yael Pomerantz, head of the Health Ministry’s Suicide Prevention Unit, said great strides have been made in suicidality prevention in Israel. “All of the large local authorities, and those with high suicidality rates, are either participating in programs or are in the assimilation phase. This covers a significant portion of Israel’s population,” she told the committee.

Dr. Chava Friedman, director of the Educational Psychology Department in the Ministry of Education, said: “This year we trained 3,000 psychologists, and almost all the school counselors. There is a major change in the education system’s approach to this issue [suicide], but there is a severe shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as a difficulty to identify mental distress among teenagers. It is important to enhance the responses within the local authorities that are already in the program rather than just try to add more local authorities.”

Writing in The Jerusalem Post (February 22, 2023), Maayan Hoffman cited a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015, showing that “the more that a country adheres to the rule of law, the more likely it is that it has a healthy population.” 

The chaos ensuing from the Netanyahu-Levin attack on the justice system has not only distracted short-term attention from the urgent crisis of teens in trouble, but it will also have a negative long-term impact on the mental health of our children and population in general. 

The teen crisis in the US

In the United States, a just-out report by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) surveyed a national sample of high school students from 2011 through 2021. The key findings:

• Mental health among teens continues to worsen; more than 40% of high school students feel so sad or hopeless, that they couldn’t engage in their regular activities for at least two weeks.
• Significant increases occurred in the percentage of youth who seriously considered suicide.
• Across almost all measures, female students are faring more poorly than male students. In 2021, almost 60% of female students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and nearly 25% made a suicide plan.

Blame the social media: One of the main theories on the causes of higher suicide attempts and depression among our youth is related to the increasing use by young people of social media. There is growing evidence to support this claim.

According to an online post by the renowned US Mayo Clinic, “A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 750 youths aged 13 to 17 found that 45% are online almost constantly, and 97% use a social media platform, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat…. Social media use can negatively affect teens, distracting them, disrupting their sleep, and exposing them to bullying, rumor spreading, unrealistic views of other people’s lives, and peer pressure.”

In a new book by reporter Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, he recounts his visit to Facebook’s head office. 

“A short time before my visit [to Facebook], some Facebook researchers, appointed internally to study their technology’s effects, in response to growing suspicion that the site might be worsening America’s political divisions, had warned internally that the platform was doing exactly what the company’s executives had, in our conversations, shrugged off.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” the researchers warned in a 2018 presentation later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the presentation continued, Facebook’s systems were designed in a way that delivered users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform… Executives shelved the research and largely rejected its recommendations…”

More than a decade ago, our teens were already in trouble. And we knew it.

Writing in The Times of Israel in 2012, David Shammah quoted a study by Dr. Yuval Dror, College of Management:

“Israeli kids aren’t just connected to the Internet; they’re hyper-connected, with three out of four 15- to 17-year-olds connecting to Facebook or other social media every day, engaging socially online far more than their American contemporaries. 

“Israeli kids are online for hours a day, with users aged 15-24 spending about a fifth of their time surfing the Internet on their mobile phones. And among the younger set (12-14), 81 percent use social networks as one of the primary ways of keeping in touch with friends.”

As always, technology is far ahead of society’s ability to mitigate its social damage. And our youth in particular are paying the price.

When Israel emerges from the dark dangerous tunnel it is in now, I believe it will have in place two things – at last, some sort of constitutional framework defining the rules of democracy for all time; and a populace that at last understands how vital true democracy is for every citizen, for our sustained wellbeing.

It took the United States 89 years to settle the rules of democracy from its founding in 1776; not until January 31, 1865, was slavery banned and every state was compelled to comply. The cost was immense – a bloody Civil War. 

Israel is only 75 years old. We are a young country, still working out the rules of democracy by which everyone will be governed. The current crisis will in the end clarify and solidify our democratic system. But it may be a painful road on the way, and crucially important matters, such as our teens in trouble, are as a result being swept aside. 

Our young people, our future, and my grandchildren among them, may be deeply scarred.  ■

Chaos – finding a bright spot

A friend sent me a video clip on WhatsApp. In it, daycare attendants were leading a parade down a sidewalk, with a dozen tots aged two and three holding hands in single file as they chanted “De-Mo-Cra-Tia! De-Mo-Cra-Tia!” 

A psychologist I spoke with about it was horrified. “Leave the kids out of it,” she said. “They already have serious trauma over the current chaos.”

Perhaps. But maybe there is a bright side to the chaotic situation Israel now faces. 

About half the world’s 200 countries are democracies of some kind. In those democracies, including Israel, I believe many people have largely taken democracy for granted. Once in four years, you submit your ballot – and then forget about it. In Israel, voters went to the polls last Nov. 1 for the fifth time in four years! Like a Big Mac or a rich desert with a mound of whipped cream – too much of a good thing.

But the truth is, few of us in Israel really thought about the complexities of democracy, checks and balances, the three branches of good government, and the fragility of the system. Until now, when democracy is under frontal assault.

As it was on January 6, 2021, in the US.

Two-year-olds may not understand what De-Mo-Cra-Tia means as they chant it. But later, they will. And so will everyone, from age two to 102, as the frontal assault on Israeli democracy moves ahead in the Knesset. 

The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion and blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.