Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported a huge increase in the percentage of American high school students suffering from depression.

The numbers are grim: “In 2021, 57% of high-school girls reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year, compared with 36% in 2011. Thirty percent reported they seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021, up from 19% in 2011.”

Adolescence can be a very challenging stage of life in the best of times. Millions of teens are trying to feel comfortable in their own skins. Many teens experience additional challenges, such as a broken home, an alcoholic or drug-impaired parent, the death of a loved one, bullying, social cliquishness among peers, or being sexually assaulted, exploited, or abused. This list is long.

Yet, those problems have been known for a long time. What has changed over the last decade to produce such a marked rise in teenage depression? There’s a strong indicator in the Wall Street Journal report: It turns out that depression is assailing liberal and progressive kids disproportionately.

The progressive worldview is downright depressing, and those who are pushing those doom-and-gloom views—particularly educators and politicians—are to blame for getting so many impressionable young people hooked on sadness and pessimism. So self-absorbed and self-important are the purveyors and indoctrinators of their dark worldview that they feel no shame in smothering youthful happiness with fear, inculcating anxiety instead of confidence, strangling hope with despair, countering the traditional American can-do spirit with defeatism, and crushing the natural optimism of youth with chronic pessimism.

Several years ago, I wrote that teaching children in school that the human race is on the brink of an apocalyptic climate disaster—a false narrative that belongs in the realm of science fiction rather than science—was a form of educational malpractice and child abuse. The problem has only gotten worse since then. How pathetic it is to see gullible children carrying placards proclaiming, “Our house [i.e. Earth] is on fire.” There’s an abundance of good news on the climate front to report, but our school children—subject to “green” curriculums shaped by the aggressive political agenda of the Environmental Protection Agency—are subjected to a slanted, warped barrage of doom.

It isn’t just climate-change hysteria that’s weighing on many American high school pupils. Critical race theory (CRT) is another joy-killer being foisted on them. This insidious curriculum—insinuated into classrooms in ways both overt and covert—teaches that the United States is forever morally debased because of the past sin of slavery. Thus, statues of people such as Thomas Jefferson should be toppled and we should be ashamed of our country today. Absent is any perspective, such as the recognition that the evil of slavery was a global phenomenon, that people like Jefferson helped pave the way for a post-slavery society, and—most important of all—that slavery is virtually inconceivable to modern Americans. Institutional slavery is long gone in America. We are free.

CRT is also employed to inject other radical ideologies that many teenagers will find discomfiting. For example, the Virginia Education Association (teachers’ union) has reportedly been using a handbook to teach CRT that includes the Marxian goal of destroying the nuclear family. It also promotes the LGBT agenda of aggressively challenging traditional gender roles whereby human society consists primarily of men and women marrying and carrying on the human race by having children.

If the ideologies of disastrous climate change and CRT aren’t enough, educators and progressive media often criticize our country mercilessly for not being perfect. As I have written before, the cult of negativity is deeply entrenched in the progressive left. It seems that the more progress we make, decade by decade, on important issues such as reducing poverty, pollution, and racism, the more virulent become the denunciations of America. The perfect has become the enemy of the good, and gratitude for good has been eclipsed by resentment that we haven’t achieved heaven on earth.

In fact, the anti-Americanism that impels many educators to teach our children that we live in a morally dubious, if not evil, country has gotten so extreme that a small group of Stanford administrators recently suggested that we avoid using the word “American,” because it makes some people uncomfortable. Instead of teaching appreciation, gratitude, and respect for all that’s good and positive about our country, too often our educators seek to demean and devalue it.

The overwrought negativism that infests so many of our nation’s classrooms is supplemented by choleric politicians. To them, everything is a crisis and our society is constantly at the precipice of disaster. Collectively, their hysterical negativism pounds away at sensitive young people, convincing the more gullible ones that our country is in the hands of evil forces and doom lurks just over the horizon. This angry barrage takes a toll, psychologically battering our young. No wonder so many kids are getting depressed.

One of the ironies and tragedies of the constant barrage of gloom-and-doom that our young people are subjected to is that they too often don’t recognize that those sounding all those false alarms really don’t have any sincere concern for the young. Progressives warn about nonexistent crises and ignore real ones. We aren’t careening toward climate catastrophe; the family is a good, even necessary, social institution; America isn’t a racist society. We are, however, marching toward a day of financial reckoning in the form of an ever-expanding federal debt of over $31 trillion. That colossal debt is understandably depressing, yet progressives not only refrain from warning about that time bomb, but are also actively leading the charge to make it worse by demanding evermore unaffordable spending.

If progressives really cared about our youth, they wouldn’t be saddling them with this gigantic, crushing financial burden. Let’s hope that America’s youth will someday connect the dots and realize that progressive politics is a road to serfdom, not to a better America, and that their mental and economic health will be much improved by rejecting the ideology of progressivism.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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     Mark Hendrickson is an economist who retired from the faculty of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he remains fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom. He is the author of several books on topics as varied as American economic history, anonymous characters in the Bible, the wealth inequality issue, and climate change, among others.