The Kids Are Actually Alright: What Lost 1970s Tapes Reveal About the Youth Mental Health Crisis

Are today’s young people really struggling more than any generation before them? For years, psychologists, including The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos, pointed to rising rates of anxiety and depression on college campuses as proof of an unprecedented youth mental health crisis. But a remarkable discovery hidden in a Harvard attic is forcing researchers to rethink everything they thought they knew about college student mental health across generations.

When Harvard researcher Dr. Alexis Redding, faculty co-chair at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor of Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, was hired to sort through dusty boxes in a forgotten attic archive, she stumbled upon something no one expected: hundreds of hours of unpublished interview recordings of college students from the 1950s-1970s. What she heard stopped her in her tracks. The loneliness, academic pressure, social anxiety, depression, and existential uncertainty those students described were virtually identical to what today’s Gen Z students bring into her office. She set out to see what the students thought and the results were remarkable: today’s students were unable to spot meaningful differences between their own mental health struggles and those of their parents or grandparents’ generation.

So why do we so consistently believe the kids today have it worse? Psychologist Dr. Adam Mastroianni calls this the “illusion of moral decline”—our deeply ingrained tendency to see the present as worse than the past. Two well-documented biases work together to distort our perception: the negativity bias, which makes us hyper-aware of today’s problems, and the fading affect bias, which causes painful memories from the past to soften over time. The result is a rosier view of “the good old days” that simply doesn’t hold up against the data. Across more than 200,000 archival survey data points spanning decades and dozens of countries, researchers found no evidence that people have actually become less kind, honest, or decent—and in controlled economic experiments, people today are actually ten percent more generous than they were in the 1950s.

This isn’t to say that youth mental health struggles aren’t real—they absolutely are, and clinical-level mental health challenges among college students have genuinely increased and deserve serious attention and resources. But Dr. Redding makes a crucial distinction between students facing true clinical crises and the much larger group navigating the normal, hard, universal experience of being a young adult in transition. When we collapse those two groups together, we risk stigmatizing ordinary growing pains as pathology and inadvertently telling an entire generation that they’re uniquely broken. The more empowering truth, backed by decades of hidden data, is that the struggles of young adulthood are a shared human experience.

Learn more on The Happiness Lab‘s “Are Kids Today Really Worse?”