Anxiety in the age of Barbie

It was “the summer of girl power,” a tour de force by a glittering troika. With pink dream houses, songs and sequins, Barbie, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé buoyed the economy and sent women’s confidence soaring.

So I felt sad, talking to friends dropping daughters off at college, to hear of rampant anxiety, campuses awash in SSRIs — serotonin boosters found in drugs like Prozac and Lexapro — and long waits for therapy.

It is a major topic among mums: daughters struggling with anxiety or the effects of anti-anxiety medications, which can include weight gain and loss of libido. Many young college women are ping-ponging between anxiety, without pills, and numbness and body insecurity, with them.

These young women seem to have everything, yet they are unable to fully enjoy a stretch in their life that should be sizzling with adventure and promise.

“Back-to-school was always a time of excitement about where the future was headed — new notebooks, fresh supplies,” mused a friend, the mother of a teenage daughter. “But it feels like people are disappearing into sadness. Everybody’s looking for a shrink instead of a sharpened pencil.”

Billie Eilish’s song in the Barbie movie, What Was I Made For?, became the anthem of anxious and depressed young women, partly because Eilish has been open about her struggles between the ages of 12 and 16, her suicidal thoughts, self-harming and body dysmorphia.

On the surface, the lyrics are about a doll morphing into a human, but Eilish, 21, says they also reflect her own agonizing journey.

I used to float, now I just fall down

I used to know but I’m not sure now

What I was made for. …

I don’t know how to feel

But someday, I might. …

When did it end? All the enjoyment

I’m sad again, don’t tell my boyfriend

It’s not what he’s made for.

Adolescent despair has been copiously analysed in recent years: the harm from social media, microtargeting algorithms that inflame envy and conflict and divisive politics, unending school shootings, Covid sequestration, a planet devoured by flames and floods, a “never enough” achievement and consumer culture, anxious adults creating a jittery atmosphere, a digitally connected yet emotionally disjointed and spiritually unmoored society.

“Young people are taking in a lot of alarming information, and due to digital devices, they — like many of us — are taking the information in all day, every day,” said Lisa Damour, the author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.

It goes beyond the young. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on “The Booming Business of American Anxiety” that began, “A search for ‘anxiety relief’ on Google pulls up links for supplements in the form of pills, patches, gummies and mouth sprays. There are vibrating devices that hang around your neck and ‘tone your vagus nerve,’ weighted stuffed animals, bead-filled stress balls and coloring books that claim to bring calm.”