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The Success Trap: How the Pressure to Stand Out Is Fueling Anxiety, Depression, and Burnout in Teens--and the Fundamental Fix They Deserve - Hardcover

Slavin MD MEd, Stuart

 
9780593839386: The Success Trap: How the Pressure to Stand Out Is Fueling Anxiety, Depression, and Burnout in Teens--and the Fundamental Fix They Deserve
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593839382 ISBN 13: 9780593839386
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

It’s not just the phones. This crucial new investigation into the teen mental health epidemic reveals how rising expectations in school, extracurriculars, and daily life have driven unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression—and shows what you can do about it.

“A call to action for every parent, educator, and policymaker . . . Let it change the way we support our youth on the challenging journey of staying grounded, connected, and inspired.”—Daniel J. Siegel, New York Times bestselling author of Brainstorm, Mind, and Mindsight

Pediatrician, researcher, and former Associate Dean for Curriculum at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Dr. Stuart Slavin draws on his experiences working to reverse burnout and anxiety among high-achieving students to argue that the problem isn’t just technology—it’s also the system that demands constant performance. In The Success Trap, he demonstrates how the culture of achievement has become a key contributor to the teen mental health crisis, and how it can be reimagined for better outcomes and greater well-being.

From school and sports to college admissions and parental and societal expectations, young people are navigating an environment where success is demanded at every turn—often at the cost of their well-being. During his tenure as Dean of Curriculum at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Dr. Slavin led a program that resulted in an 80% decrease in rates of depression and anxiety among his medical students—all while improving academic outcomes.

Based on his successes, parents will learn to:

  • Teach resilience
  • Reduce demands and pressure
  • And provide kids with more control, more choice, and more opportunities to find meaning and joy

The Success Trap lays out this same three-pronged approach to improving teen mental health, especially during the critical high school years and beyond—without sacrificing performance or ambition. Drawing on years of clinical expertise and educational research, Dr. Slavin offers gentle, practical guidance for parents, educators, and students themselves to help break the cycle and redefine what true success looks like: not just achievement, but mentally resilient, healthy, and happy teens.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Slavin, MD, MEd, a nationally recognized well-being expert, has several lenses that inform his view of the current child and adolescent mental health crisis. A board-certified pediatrician, Dr. Slavin practiced general pediatrics for seventeen years at UCLA. As a researcher, Dr. Slavin has conducted studies involving the mental health of medical students, medical residents, medical education staff, and in recent years, high school and college students. Dr. Slavin’s interest in mental health and well-being began when, as curriculum dean at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, he spearheaded efforts to improve the mental health of medical students that led to 80% reductions in rates of depression and anxiety–all while increasing performance levels. Dr. Slavin is a frequent lecturer who speaks regularly at schools and regional, national, and international education meetings. Dr. Slavin has received numerous education, teaching, and clinical awards and recognition over the course of his career, including the Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award in 2013.

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Chapter 1

The Adolescent Mental Health Crisis: It’s Not Just About Tech

There is little disagreement among researchers, mental health professionals, and policy makers that we have a teen mental health crisis on our hands; however, there is significant debate about the cause. In recent years, a number of prominent voices, including former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy, social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, and psychologist and researcher Jean Twenge, have attributed the reason for this emergency to the rise in use of digital technology, especially social media, among children and adolescents, and in Haidt’s case to a simultaneous decline in real-world opportunities for free play in childhood. They have a compelling theory, one that resonates for many of us, as examples of each abound in our lives; our kids’ curated schedules combined with too much screen-based activity, and their many attendant ills, bear little resemblance to the childhoods that some of us remember so fondly. And yet, as appealing as it is to embrace one cause, or a pair of dovetailing causes, the story of how this increase in teen mental illness developed and took hold of a great swath of adolescents is, I believe, far more complex.

In this chapter, I’ll review some of the evidence that links social media and digital technology use to an increase in teen distress and offer you an additional view based in my own research and others’, one that will ring true for many of you: namely, that in many communities across the country and around the globe, it is school and extracurricular demands and achievement pressure that are driving this crisis. I’m not saying that social media and technology aren’t a problem, far from it; I believe that they are, especially when combined with academic pressure. But if we focus only on a single cause, we miss being able to address something that has been hiding in plain sight for years—that we demand way too much of our kids in school and extracurricular activities, and it’s taking a serious toll on them.

Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has drawn tremendous attention to how rampant and pervasive digital technology use is among teens, and even children, and how detrimental it can be to their developing minds. As he points out, it has unbalanced—to say the least—the foundations of childhood and family life. Wherever we look, it seems that we can find groups of kids and young adults, heads buried in their phones, their minds far away from the world around them. Educators struggle to compete with devices to maintain the attention of their students, and parents worry about kids who are lost to online content and exposed to porn, hate, and violence, yet have little understanding of how to pull them back or keep them safe. They sense that so much screen time and the corresponding loss of in-person connection is undermining their children in multiple ways but feel ill equipped to deal with the problem. I agree with much that Haidt has to say and welcome his and others’ expertise on the subject. I believe that some aspects and impacts of screen-based activities and social media are problematic and are very likely contributing to the rise in mental illness in teens. I believe, however, that we are remiss when we fail to acknowledge that for some young folks social media provides a lifeline as they find “their people” in online groups. Many of his policy recommendations make good sense to me, such as banning smartphone use in schools, as does his parenting advice, including creating device-free times, waiting as long as possible before giving your teen a smartphone, and reclaiming family time. I agree with his assertion that free (meaning unsupervised by an adult) play has virtually disappeared from childhood and that this lack of time and space to explore, to practice being in relationship with others, and to enjoy being a kid is having profound negative downstream consequences—social, physical, and intellectual—that carry into adulthood.

However, I do not believe that the use of digital technology by kids, and the world it has been instrumental in shaping for them, is the only driver of our teen mental health crisis, or even the primary driver in some communities. Other important forces are also at play, and we neglect them at our peril. I’ll begin by addressing what I see as the limitations of a position that only focuses on tech and obscures a deeper and more complex understanding of the threats to teens’ mental health—why they often feel so stressed, unworthy, and ill equipped to carry on in their current lives, let alone transition into adult life.

Looking at the Evidence

A key element of Haidt’s theory rests on a sharp increase in teen depression and anxiety rates starting in 2010 that coincides with a rise in smartphone use and what he refers to as a phone-based childhood. He asserts that the dramatic upsurge in the use of tech was the only major societal shift at the time that could have produced such a huge increase in mental illness, so, perforce, smartphones and the digital world must be the cause. While the evidence he brings forward may seem compelling, I have several concerns with this viewpoint.

Depression in Teens over the Decades

Haidt uses various graphs to illustrate his point, including one that tracks depression rates in girls and boys ages twelve to seventeen from 2004 to 2023. I took that same data, combined the boys and girls, and created the graph below.

The data is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and reports the percentage of that age group who have suffered at least one major depressive episode in the past year, which is a proxy for depression rate. Before delving into this data, it’s important to state that this rise in depression is not a new trend, as the graph seems to suggest. Teen depression rates were not stable for a long stretch of time prior to a dramatic uptick in 2010. The graph starts in 2004, the year when the NSDUH survey began asking about depression, and Haidt used this dataset for good reason—it is rare to have such high-quality measurements of depression across a twenty-year span. That said, to have a full picture of teen depression and its cause(s), we need to have some idea of what was happening during the years before 2004, and for that we must turn to other data sources and research. While there are not the same high-quality measures stretching over the previous decades, there is strong evidence and general scientific consensus that the mental health of teens and young adults has been in steady decline for years—from long before the widespread adoption of smartphones—and this is supported by multiple studies. One such study, published in 2005, analyzed data from a national survey of outpatient (clinic) visits by kids aged seven to seventeen years. They found that between 1995 and 2002, the number of visits for depression more than doubled, from 1.44 million to 3.22 million.

Researcher Jean Twenge, who in recent years has become a strong proponent of the link between screens and poor mental health, was lead author on two studies that provide evidence that mental illness has been on the increase for decades. The first examined data from studies of teens from 1951 to 2002, utilizing the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which includes questions about mental health. Twenge found significant increases in scores on mental illness scales, including depression, and she concluded that adolescent mental illness rose considerably over...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593839382
ISBN 13 
9780593839386
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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