Although students with the fixed mindset showed more depression, there were still plenty of people with the growth mindset who felt pretty miserable, this being peak season for depression. And here we saw something really amazing. The more depressed people with the growth mindset felt (short of severe depression), the more they took action to confront their problems, the more they made sure to keep up with their schoolwork, and the more they kept up with their lives. The worse they felt, the more determined they became!

In fact, from the way they acted, it might have been hard to know how despondent they were.

A paradox seems to have arisen in that the high accord attached to the self appears to be associated with an increase in misery and insecurity, if the relatively recent increase in self-harm, depression and suicide among young people may be considered indicators of this disturbing trend.

The General Social Survey asks Americans to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent.

TEN: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?

“Perhaps the most useful thing I did was send him a video. My friend Mike Gerson, the Washington Post columnist, had been hospitalized with depression in early 2019. He delivered a beautiful sermon at the National Cathedral about his experience before he died of complications from cancer in November 2022. Depression, he said, was a “malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.

One notable thing that happened during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic is that the suicide rate in England and the USA went down, despite the fact that many people had confidently predicted that the opposite would happen. After all, the rate had been rising for many years, and there were plenty of reasons to believe that an event which worsened many of the normal indicia of suicide — economic loss, loneliness, mental health problems — would make things worse. But somehow, although the virus and the lockdown were awful for many, they weren’t quite as unbearable as everyday life over the previous decade.