>Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.

This is a consequence of a rapid and widespread dispersal of information regarding systemic inequalities. And, sadly, the reduced power of the individual to reduce or overturn them in modern society. We're learning so much more so much faster about how our peers are being subjugated or disempowered that the human mind cannot rationalize it and cannot formulate a plan to stop it. The amount of terrible things isn't increasing proportionally, but the spotlight on it is growing brighter and the extremism that results is growing more aggressive. Which is why I disagree with this:

>The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

>Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

Matt Iglesias gets the closest in the article but then just says "Well that isn't convenient to me." The conservatives are literally ignoring the warning signs because it's been ingrained into them from childhood to do so. "Do not question authority because you are the one who has given power to the authority. Do not engage your curiousity because it will not be rewarded. The system cannot fail you as the system was designed by you." Reality normally is depressing. It's just that in the past we didn't have the spare time to worry about that between rushing for daily survival up until the Industrial Revolution, and being mislead by organizations meant to stabilize centralized power such as the Catholic Church. With all this free time, access to the information, and ability to communicate it, we're realizing how much everything sucks.

Depression after all is the brain going into a survival mode designed to shut down or reduce reliance on all other parts used for information processing except those required to continue existing. Chronic depression occurs when the brain can't exit that temporary survival mode and this reduced functionality becomes standard. Constant bombardment with news of negative outcomes and negative societal trends means obviously more people will not be able to escape the short term depression, marking the permanent change into chronic depression.

The intellectual and empathetic curiousity of those who tend to be progressive also means that they're more likely to not only learn about the inequalities which will negatively affect their moods, but they will actively seek them out in order to educate or satisfy themselves. Teenagers who are just becoming politically aware have a litany of tragedies to gorge themselves on, with everything from generational wealth decline to information suppression to surveillance capitalism to an environmental apocalypse. A lot of these kids feel like they have no future.

And this slams right into another issue that has roots going back over two thousand years: Paternalistic societies that feel the need to both guard and exploit white women, to both infantilize and fetishize them. Euro-centric and Euro-derived societies still haven't gotten past that paternalism because the first major challenges to it in millennia only started a little over a hundred years ago. When you have a society that's still trying to divorce itself from that but still fetishizes that ideal of what womanhood is, it's so much easier for young girls to get confused as to what they should be and what they should believe in. What results is these women are told that upholding the paternalistic societies is in their best interest, and that comes into conflict with the (often lived) information that they receive from people who aren't in the position to benefit from that paternalistic society. And this isn't even getting into how this affects asexuals or transgender individuals, which I could be here for hours talking about.