Mental Illness

Jonathan Haidt has been tracking the spike in Millennial mental illness since 2011, when smartphone apps featuring extremely addictive properties first appeared. Since then, anxiety, depression and self-harm among girls has increased on a hockey-stick curve. Something analogous but not identical has happened to boys.

We tend to think the family is the basic problem here. We think the family is sociologically out of date and needs to be rethought. BF Skinner’s Walden Two was definitely a good try and we’d like to see in embellished. We think violence, crime and all manner of related social problems, including irresponsible corporate practice and hapless mental illness, can be traced to how the family is being plugged in to contemporary society. We think the family needs to be replaced by something better, and we think we have a way to help do that.

“‘The significant history of our times,’ Frazier began, ‘is the story of the growing weakness of the family. The decline of the home as a medium for perpetuating a culture, the struggle for equality for women, including their right to select professions other than housewife or nursemaid, the extraordinary consequences of birth control and the practical separation of sex and parenthood, the social recognition of divorce, the critical issue of blood relationship or race—all these are parts of the same field. And you can hardly call it quiescent.

“‘The community must solve the problem of the family by revising certain established practices. That’s absolutely inevitable. The family is an ancient form of community, and the customs and habits which have been set up to perpetuate it are out of place in a society which isn’t based on blood ties. Walden Two replaces the family, not only as an economic unit, but to some extent as a social and psychological unit as well. What is to survive is an experimental question.’”

Skinner, B. F.. Walden Two (Hackett Classics) (p. 128).