The Youth Mental Health Crisis Has a Deeper Cause Than Social Media

The most anxious generation in recorded history did not become that way because of their phones. That is the uncomfortable implication of a study published this week in Psychological Bulletin, which tracked perfectionism in college students across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom from 1989 to 2024. Across 307 samples and nearly 83,000 young people, the same pattern kept emerging: each successive cohort worried more about mistakes, doubted themselves more, and felt more acutely scrutinised by the people around them. The acceleration began around the year 2000. Smartphones arrived a decade later.

Thomas Curran, a psychologist at the London School of Economics who has spent much of his career tracking this trend, puts it plainly. “Perfectionism is a public health risk,” he says. “It’s associated with increased depression and anxiety.” The new analysis, the most comprehensive yet attempted, extends an earlier meta-analysis Curran published in 2019, this time adding measures of economic inequality and GDP per capita to see whether the rise in perfectionism follows the contours of an economy that has, since the early 2000s, become less mobile and more stratified.

It does, rather precisely.

Two Types of Pressure, Two Economic Drivers

Researchers in this field distinguish between what they call perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns. The first is roughly motivational: setting excessively high standards, working relentlessly to meet them. The second is something darker: fear of failure, sensitivity to others’ judgments, a chronic sense of not quite measuring up. Both are rising. But the concerns dimension is rising much faster, following a quadratic curve that bends sharply upward once you get past the millennium. In practical terms, a typical college student today would score at around the 71st percentile of the 1988 distribution for perfectionistic concerns. The average 1988 student sits at the 50th percentile, by definition. That is a large shift in 35 years.

What drives which dimension, though, turns out to depend on which economic condition you examine. When GDP per capita falls, strivings go up. The interpretation is somewhat intuitive once you sit with it: declining economic opportunity leads young people to compensate by pushing harder, setting more demanding personal targets, doubling down on achievement as the only available strategy. “When there’s a lack of economic opportunity,” Curran says, “young people seem to compensate with striving.”

The concerns dimension obeys a different logic. It tracks inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, not absolute economic output. In countries and time periods where the gap between rich and poor widens, the fear of making a mistake grows steeper. The researchers suggest this makes a kind of grim sense: in highly stratified societies, errors carry heavier consequences. Losing ground when there is little ground to spare, or when the distance between the top and the bottom is vast, is genuinely more costly. Fear, in other words, becomes rational.

What is particularly striking is that both economic conditions have been in place simultaneously across the US, Canada, and the UK since roughly 2000. Secular stagnation (the prolonged slowing of GDP growth below the rate of return on capital) and widening inequality have converged over the same period that perfectionistic concerns began their steepest ascent. The study cannot prove causation, and the authors are careful to say so. But the alignment is not coincidental-looking.

When Being Imperfect Gets More Expensive

The detail that stands out most in the underlying data is the trajectory of concerns over mistakes specifically. Of all the perfectionism dimensions tracked, this one showed the largest increase by far, nearly four times that of personal standards. Rising concerns over mistakes is not simply about being hard on yourself after an error. Researchers break it into three components: a tendency to react negatively to mistakes, a tendency to equate mistakes with personal failure, and a belief that other people will judge harshly anyone who makes one. Taken together, they describe a psychology in which public imperfection is genuinely threatening. The study also found that doubts about actions, a measure of chronic indecisiveness and uncertainty about whether tasks have been completed correctly, rose at a substantial rate. Procrastination, compulsivity, the inability to finalise a decision. These are the behavioural signatures.

One might argue, charitably, that rising perfectionism merely reflects higher standards and is therefore not really a problem. The study addresses this directly. If perfectionism were becoming normalised, decoupled from distress, you would expect its correlation with anxiety and depression to weaken over time as more people adopted it as a background condition. That is not what happened. The relationship between perfectionism and mental health outcomes remained stable across all 35 years of data. Which means that as perfectionism rises, the number of people experiencing its psychological costs rises proportionally. Population-level harm, the researchers conclude, is worsening.

This finding carries implications for how we read the broader youth mental health picture. Much of the policy debate has concentrated on smartphones and social media as the primary culprits, and there is genuine evidence for some of that association. But Curran’s data suggests a prior, structural problem. “Phones and social media have received a lot of the blame,” he says, “but the rise in perfectionism predates social media. This research study suggests something deeper is at work.” His argument, expanded in a 2023 book, is that neoliberal economic culture generates perfectionism through at least three interlocking pathways: a hyperindividualist consumer culture that commodifies the self, a meritocratic ideology that equates achievement with personal worth, and intensifying parental pressure driven by anxiety about competitive positioning in an economy where the consequences of falling behind are severe.

Social media, on this reading, did not create the pressure to appear flawless. It amplified a pressure that was already there, embedded in the structural conditions that most of the debate about youth mental health has so far avoided examining closely.

Current perfectionism scores remain well below the theoretical maximum on the scales used, which means there is no ceiling effect likely to slow the trend in the near term. Whether it abates depends, Curran argues, less on phone bans or parenting guides than on whether the economic conditions underlying it shift: greater shared prosperity, reduced inequality, some restoration of the social mobility that meritocratic ideology promises but increasingly fails to deliver. That is a considerably harder problem than asking teenagers to spend less time on Instagram. But it may be the right problem.

https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000518

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between perfectionism and having high standards?

Researchers distinguish between perfectionistic strivings (setting high personal standards and working hard to meet them) and perfectionistic concerns (fear of failure, sensitivity to others’ judgments, and distress over mistakes). High standards alone are not necessarily harmful. It is the concerns dimension, the chronic worry and self-scrutiny, that most strongly predicts anxiety and depression, and it is this dimension that has risen most sharply over the past 35 years.

Why does the study focus on college students specifically?

College students have been surveyed using standardised perfectionism measures since the late 1980s, which makes them the only population for which data spanning 35 years is available in sufficient volume for this kind of meta-analysis. The authors acknowledge the limitation: college samples skew toward higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and the findings may not generalise to the full population of young people.

How does economic inequality increase fear of making mistakes?

In more unequal societies, the social and economic consequences of errors and failure tend to be larger. Falling short when social mobility is limited and the gap between top and bottom is wide is genuinely more costly, so heightened vigilance around mistakes becomes a rational, if psychologically damaging, response. The study found that the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, predicted steeper increases in perfectionistic concerns specifically, not in the motivation-related strivings dimension.

Is the rise in perfectionism just a result of social media?

The timeline argues against this as a primary cause. The acceleration in socially prescribed perfectionism and perfectionistic concerns began around the year 2000, roughly a decade before smartphones became ubiquitous and before Instagram and TikTok existed. Rising inequality and slowing economic growth predate widespread social media use by a similar margin. The researchers suggest that technology may amplify pre-existing pressures rather than create them independently.

Can perfectionism be reduced at the population level?

The study’s authors argue that interventions focused purely on individuals, such as cognitive behavioural therapy for perfectionism, are unlikely to be sufficient if the structural economic conditions driving it remain unchanged. Policies that reduce inequality, improve social mobility, and ease the intensity of meritocratic competition in education are, in their view, necessary complements to individual treatment. The researchers also note that current scores remain well below the maximum on the measurement scales, meaning there is still room for meaningful intervention before the trend becomes harder to reverse.